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COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



DEKA PARSEC 



Deka Parsec 



SHELL-SHOCKED VIEWS OF LIFE 



BY 
LOUIS MOLNAR 



1921 
GRAFTON PUBLISHING CORPORATION 

LOS ANGELES 



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COPYRIGHT 

LOUIS MOLNAR 

1921 



g)ClA630393 



NOV 17 1921 












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CONTENTS 

On The Mountain 9 

Desert Places 21 

Vicarious Activities 33 

Charity 43 

Lizard Lodge 55 

The Count 63 

Ceremony 73 

Helping To Build Rome 83 

Love Murders 93 

The Postman 101 

Walking 109 

The Tourist ....119 

From Cellar To Garret 127 

Caste 135 

Suicide „ 145 

The Grab Bag Vision 153 

Thoughts _ ....163 

The Ideal The Only Real 171 

Five Towns In One 179 

The Poetic Attitude 189 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 



"You win the tomatoes," said a voice very 
near me. 

I jumped to my feet and looked behind the 
manzanita bush. There sat a large handsome 
man. He smiled at my surprised gesture, and 
then repeated : "You win the tomatoes." 

"Good morning," I stammered, "but I don't 
exactly see — " 

"I registered a bet," he explained, "that I was 
the only person on the mountain so early in the 
morning." 

"Oh, I understand. It is early for city peo- 
ple to be on the trail. Were you going to the 
top of San Gabriel?" 

'Well, no," he said hesitantly, as though he 
might be persuaded to change his plans. "I 
am going to Barley Flats, but it's all a whim, 
as you might say. I am studying the habits 
of nocturnal animals and insects. I like the 
mountain mists." He grasped the manzanita 
and shook a shower of dew upon the ground. 
"Look at that spider web. What perfect en- 

9 



10 DEKA PARSEC 

gineering ! Look how scientifically it has placed 
the guy lines. No human engineer could have 
done better. I like to hunt these delicate webs 
when the dew is on them." 

"Yes," I assented, "they are very interesting, 
and I—" 

"Excuse me," he interrupted, "you don't 
have to agree with me about spiders or any- 
thing else. I am only a perambulating shell- 
shock, which means that I am different. I was 
one of the eight horses that went up from Brest 
with the forty men, and we went all the way. 
They drafted me out of my senior year in the 
university and sucked me into a thing called the 
Argonne. They spoiled a good engineer in the 
making. For these reasons you need not feel 
obliged to agree with me. Take me as an old 
friend, for you see, one of my peculiarities is 
that I get acquainted with strangers very eas- 
ily." Then he beamed upon me with such an 
explanatory smile that to doubt would have 
been impossible. 

"All right, old friends we are then," I re- 
turned, "but I am really interested in spiders. 
Of course I can not pretend to be up on spider 
lore from the scientific viewpoint, and I don't 
belong to any society for the study of ento- 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 11 

mology, but I have watched spiders by the 
hour." 

"Speaking of a society reminds me," he spoke 
up quickly, "it seems that a man in shabby 
clothes sat for several hours opposite Central 
Park in New York, intently watching a tree. 
Officious by-standers called the attention of a 
policeman, saying that they believed the man 
was crazy. He told the policeman that he was 
watching a pair of sparrows, in whose nest a 
cuckoo had laid an egg. This explained noth- 
ing to the officer of the law, but a card in the 
possession of the tree-gazer showing that he 
belonged to an ornithological society saved the 
situation." 

"And do you belong to a spider society?" I 
asked. 

"Oh, no," he laughed, "I don't have to belong. 
I keep far away from the habitat of policemen. 
I am bewildered and dizzy enough yet to wonder 
why a tree-gazer should be considered crazy in 
a city where men howl for hours in a stock ex- 
change six days in the week and then refresh 
their frenzied souls by listening to a jazz band 
in a roof -garden on Sunday." 

"You are a very young man to denounce 
jazz," I observed. 



12 DEKA PARSEC 

"Yes, I know that is true. Possibly I should 
apologize or, rather explain, but, you see, that 
only shows up another phase of my strange dis- 
ability. Ever since that Boche shell with my 
number on it, came over, I can't see things the 
way I once did. When I hear the newsboys yell- 
ing about bloody murder, wrecks, suffering and 
suicide, I wonder just why that kind of news is 
so pleasant to every one but me. I can't seem 
to understand. Is there never any good news? 
Even in books I find that happiness has no his- 
tory; it leaves no trace. I suppose all this can 
be explained by the fact that I am reversed on 
everything. My nerves will not respond in 
ecstasy, to the tales of other people's suffering. 
The newsbobys offer it and try to please me, but 
I can not enjoy this misery as normal people 
do." 

"May it not be," I suggested, "that people 
wish to read about the unusual?" 

"Well, yes, but," he objected, "murder, war, 
scandal, sudden death, accidents, general mis- 
ery and suicide are not at all unusual. They 
are common and usual to the point of mono- 
tony. Indeed, I have to come up here to escape 
them. If I could look at these things from the 
angle of the normal man undoubtedly I would 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 13 

discover much good in them. The people who 
enjoy these tales must be right after all. I 
can see that. I remember how I enjoyed them 
when I was normal. Nature must have her 
contrasts, and a natural man will derive much 
pleasure from the shadows of life. Now, you 
should understand that I like the world as it 
is. I don't want to fix anything. Whether I am 
right or wrong about my dislikes, the world al- 
ways has a pleasant place for me. I can run 
away to my spiders and things." 

"Are you going back to the university?" I 
asked. 

"No, I feel that it makes no real difference 
now. I am reversed on that too." 

"Are you going to make entomology your 
life work?" I pursued. 

"Life work?" he chuckled. "That's another 
subject I'm reversed on. I express myself only 
in play; work is immoral." 

"Immoral?" I repeated, incredulously. 

"Yes, immoral, in a sense," he replied smiling 
at the same time to soften the challenged state- 
ment, "unless you love it. Unloved work is 
simply the disgraceful slavish price we pay for 
our needless necessities. The cry of more pro- 
duction is all nonsense. I am an individualist 



14 BEKA PARSEC 

on this subject of work. It pleases me better 
to cut down my needs rather than to speed up 
my efforts. I got over-speeded in the war; that 
war velocity is going to last me a whole life- 
time." 

By tacit consent we followed the up-grade 
of the trail and approached the top of the moun- 
tain. From time to time we stopped and ad- 
mired the scenery. I felt very much at ease 
with my new companion. He radiated cheer; 
he was young and yet disHked excitement and 
jazz; he lived in the strength and turbulence of 
youth, but he was calm after the great storm 
of war had done its worst for him; he seemed 
like a part of the impersonal mountain spirit, 
loveless and yet full of affection. 

"Where's the girl?" I asked him suddenly. 
His artlessness had made me impudent. "Of 
course there must be a girl ?" 

"Yes, yes, the girl," he answered quite freely. 
"There's always the girl. After that shell came 
over some one took the trouble to mislay me in 
a base hospital. I must have been an unknown 
quantity for several months. News reached the 
girl that I was dead. Mother kept on sending 
letters for a long time, refusing to believe that 
I was gone, and so I learned that the girl mar- 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 15 

ried another man. That was all right too. 
When I came out of the mist or whatever it 
was, in the hospital, I had a vague f eehng that 
something in addition to myself had been mis- 
laid. I asked the nurse about my barrack bag 
every day and told her that I had lost some- 
thing, but I couldn't remember what it was. 
Then one day came the letter from Mother tell- 
ing about the girl and how sore Mother was 
about the wedding; all at once I knew it was 
my romance that had been mislaid. I had for- 
gotten the girl entirely until that letter brought 
her back. There I was left with my love hover- 
ing in the air, like a bird over the ocean, with 
no place to light. I saw then that love had been 
one thing and the girl another — sort of an ideal 
and an idol, with the idol wearing the ideal for 
a gilded crown. It doesn't make any difference 
at all that she married another man. What is 
an idol unadorned?" 

"Don't you wish to possess the girl herself?" 
I asked. 

"No, not at all," he replied ; "my romance got 
blasted into three fragments, the love, the idol 
and the possession. I still have the love. It is 
like the sunshine that gilds that snow moun- 
tain over there; it gilds everything it touches. 



16 DEKA PARSEC 

I feel safe and happy with my heart affair just 
where the shell put it. I have noticed that the 
average male of the human species begins life 
by loving his mother; next he loves his wife; 
then his child, and he ends by loving love or 
merely an abstract idea. I went through all 
these stages in a few seconds by the force of 
high explosive." 

"Did the shell change your views on religion 
and politics also," I asked. 

"Yes," he answered with a good-natured 
laugh, "it more than changed my views; it 
scrambled them. When I was in the university 
I thought I liked socialism. Now, I see in it only 
a diseased gregariousness, the accentuation of 
an unfortunate propensity. Bolshevism and com- 
munism are fatty degenerative diseases that at- 
tack animals with the herd instinct. I believe 
in getting away from people instead of herding 
with them. I like capitalism and individualism. 
I like the rule of the jungle where God loves 
the deer so well that He makes it fleet to escape 
the lion, and then loves the lion so well that He 
enables it to catch an unwary deer now and 
then. With the deer in the lion's stomach, the 
lion is fed and happy; with the deer escaped, 
the deer is happy. 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 17 

**It is a fair field and Nature always wins, 
loving all her children without any of the nar- 
row restrictions we impose. As the Christian 
religion has never yet been applied to the lives 
of nations, it did not figure in the great war. 
The only forces that operated in the war were 
the forces of the jungle. The attitude of God 
there was the same as His attitude everywhere. 
He left man free to slaughter his kind ; victory 
went at last to the side with the greatest gun 
power and the most efficient soldiers." 

"Do you not think it was also the triumph 
of right in the end," I asked. 

"Yes, right was victorious," he replied. 
"Right has always been victorious; otherwise 
life would have ceased for man long ago. The 
right that survived after the war is like a dia- 
mond with many facets. It gives the people 
now living remarkable opportunities. Every 
person has a laudable desire to fly away on his 
own tangent. He will reject the political medi- 
cines that contain the sticky properties of com- 
munism. The war produced individuals who 
lived through unique experiences. It brought 
to some the thrill of danger, to others the hu- 
miliation of a slacker's safety. It called some to 
sacrifice all their worldly goods, and it called 



18 DEKA PARSEC 

others to be profiteers. It caused mothers to give 
up heroic sons and it caused other mothers to 
keep their sons away from danger. To each and 
every individual it gave some kind of reward. 
It created new perspectives in things moral, im- 
moral and unmoral. It was good for the rich 
to become poor, and good for the poor to become 
rich. In a very real sense the slacker lost his 
life in saving it, while the hero found his life 
in losing it. Everywhere there is balance and 
justice. There is nothing to feel sorry about; 
no dire prophecies to make ; everything is pre- 
cisely as it must be. We don't need new laws 
to regulate our conduct. I would not reform 
any one but myself." 

We had reached the summit of San Gabriel, 
and the parting of our ways. 

"May I know your name?" I asked timidly, 
feeling at the same time that my request struck 
a false note. 

"Think of me only as your shell-shocked 
friend for the present," he replied, a little em- 
barrassed. "My name went out like a light; it 
belonged to former ideals and perished with 
them; it would not truly represent me today, 
even if I had the power to remember it; but," 
he continued, and his face lighted up with a 



ON THE MOUNTAIN 19 

smile, "perhaps you will help me to find a new 
name." 

I promised to look for a name, and then we 
parted. He went down into Barley Flats, where 
the spider webs and their engineering wonders 
awaited him ; I returned to the city where 
noises produced by normal people and pneu- 
matic hammers awaited me. 



DESERT PLACES 



I took up the quest of a name, only to learn 
that he of the spiders and mountain clouds, he 
who loved ideas separated from their human re- 
lationships, and who lived in rapport with su- 
persensuous states, would require a name that 
had never done duty for any other living crea- 
ture. 

Our next meeting took place on the dusty 
path by the railroad track. I had not expected 
to meet him there, for I had not believed that 
any other person shared my secret affection for 
the glistening rails on a hot day. He shouted 
a greeting while the distance of two telegraph 
poles still separated us, and I answered with a 
sweeping wave of my hat. 

"Here we meet again," he said, "but whereas 
the name?" His eyes simulated a reproach. 
"You have no name for me?" Then with the 
evident fear that I might take his question seri- 
ously, he adopted a casual tone. "Well, never 
mind. I was unable to find one myself, and, to 
tell you the truth, I am more pleased than sorry. 
Names are strange, uncanny things when you 

21 



22 DEKA PARSEC 

come to think about them ; it is so very impor- 
tant that they should fit. We should be able 
to see the spirit of the man behind the veil 
before we attempt to name it." 

"Yes," I admitted, "no combination of sounds 
I could make seemed accurately to name you as 
you appeared to me on the mountain." 

"That proves that we are becoming ac- 
quainted," he said. "We are on the high road 
to friendship. When you know a little more my 
name will appear. May it not be that I will also 
have another name for you? Why should we 
not take on different names for our changing 
moods? I, under the spell of poetry, am not 
ike same man that I am under another mood. 
It is better to be nameless than to be yoked to 
a word that places me in the wrong category." 
Tlien, with a sudden change in tone and thought 
h^ exclaimed: "But this railroad here, this 
hot, dusty railroad, how it does affect me." 

"The railroad?" I repeated in surprise. 

**Yes, the railroad," he confirmed. "I often 
come here when I feel the need of absolute soli- 
tude. This thin, long desert of wooden ties and 
steel rails is but the elongation of the city 
loneliness projected into the life of the coun- 
try. In the city there is no change, no germina- 



DESERT PLACES 23 

tion, no growing. The streets are paved and 
dead; the buildings that guard them are also 
dead; mechanical things move along the dead 
streets and carry people who are dead in every 
faculty where Nature really lives. 

"The noises of the streets are produced by 
the clanging of dead substances and the strident 
voices of mimes that strive to prefigure to them- 
selves an illusion that they call life. The rail- 
road leaves the city and brings all that impres- 
sive solitude out here and lays it down in a nar- 
row ribbon of contrast close beside the teem- 
ing activity of the living earth. It is well for 
us to ponder over this contrast ; it is even good 
for us at times to endure the wretched loneli- 
ness of the city, and to learn by experience what 
the deprivation of companionship can actually 
mean in an artificial desert. I like to take my 
city sophistication here on this strip of urban- 
ized ground because it is only a step from the 
rails to the fields where my companions reside." 

The sun approached the zenith and raised 
quiverings of mirage over the heated roadbed. 
We sought the shady side of a pile of ties and 
settled ourselves comfortably into a position 
where we could view a field of barley waving in 
the breeze. 



24 DEKA PARSEC 

"Isn't it pleasant," said my friend, "when 
perspiration begins to evaporate ? How delight- 
fully cool it is." He sighed blissfully. "Some- 
thing always happens, too, when we pause to 
take an observation on this borderland of city 
and country. Just look at those blackbirds on 
that telegraph wire — two, four, six of them." 
He stared at them thoughtfully for a time and 
then chuckled : "A comical sight, indeed, those 
six birds on a wire ; scandalized birds they are, 
all in a ridiculous, straight row, ruthlessly 
breaking Nature's law of beauty in the curve." 

I looked at the birds, and, true to my friend's 
fancy or suggestion, they took on a silly air in 
that compromising row. I had never noticed 
such an absurdity in blackbirds before, but now 
it was obvious that they were putting the wire 
to an inconsequential use. The longer I looked 
the more it seemed that they wished to flout 
man's genius and dignity. 

"There is something wrong with them," I 
conceded, "but I am unable exactly to explain 
what it is." 

"Well, to say the least," my friend explained, 
"they occupy a false position, using the electric 
nerve of the world as a perch for their scrawny 
feet. There is something painfully unsatisfac- 



DESERT PLACES 25 

tory and almost human in their predicament. 
They have conformed to a line-up, but man- 
like, they know not that they have conformed; 
all the news of the nation is flowing through 
their feet, and yet it leaves them unenlightened ; 
they receive nothing and impart nothing. I'hey 
are unable even to talk among themselves. Bird 
number one cannot communicate with number 
six, because four unsympathetic, mechanically 
arranged birds intervene. Hypnotized by a me- 
tallic convention that keeps them in a foolish 
row on the fringe of things, they are in no 
position to maintain their self respect. If they 
stay there very long they will become es- 
tranged. I predict that they will soon fly to a 
friendly tree and smooth out the incipient en- 
mity that lurks in the straightness of the wire." 

"Do you think that cities and line-up people 
are wholly unfortunate and out of harmony 
with life?" I asked. 

"No, I do not say that," he repHed. "We 
all need some of the solitude that can only be 
found in the city. There may be a little too 
much companionship in the country. The soul 
must also learn what it is to be without com- 
panionships, to be utterly alone, and where can 
it be more alone than among thousands of arti- 



26 DEKA PARSEC 

ficial creatures who think standardized conven- 
tional thoughts or do not think at all. To gain 
the experience of that abysmal loneliness coun- 
try people must leave their living, active envir- 
onment and go to the city where Nature's voices 
are silenced. They must live for a season where 
nothing grows, where nothing changes, where 
nothing unfolds. In such a solitude meditation 
may indulge itself, and, you know, a little medi- 
tation acts as a tonic. City people go to the 
country for rest. To them the country seems 
quiet because they themselves are dead to the 
countless activities of Nature. There was a 
time in my own life, before that shell came over, 
when I thought the city was a noisy, stimulat- 
ing place, but now I go there for that voiceless, 
thoughtless quiet which can only be found 
where man has killed the living soil and covered 
it with stones from murdered hills." 

I had been watching the blackbirds while 
listening to my friend. Their uneasiness was 
very apparent. Number one looked along the 
foolish line and gave a screech of digust; his 
voice closely imitated the note of a rusty hinge ; 
then he deserted the wire ; the other birds fol- 
lowed at once and all flew to a tree in the field, 
just as my friend had prophesied. We could 



DESERT PLACES 27 

hear them gurghng and warbling as only happy- 
blackbirds can. 

"They are more than human in their feelings 
and discernments," my friend observed. "They 
have a wholesome dread of classification and 
standardization. They name themselves only in 
their songs. By the way, did you ever think of 
the dangerous power that resides in a brand 
or mark of identification ? I thought of it when 
we were discussing names. The blackbirds 
prove that I am right." 

"No," I repHed, with a little hesitation, "I 
had never exactly regarded classification as a 
dangerous power." 

"Well," he continued, "you saw how it af- 
fected the birds. I feel that it is a special 
danger of city life, although it lurks every- 
where. A butterfly may have fascinating qual- 
ities before the entomologist's pin is run 
through its body, but after that only a Greek 
name is left. A man may have brilliant apti- 
tudes and even genius before he permits himself 
to be known and admired for a specific talent; 
after that disclosure, however, he is betrayed 
and lost. His friends and foes will conspire to 
brand the sign of a single trait upon his dis- 



28 DEKA PARSEC 

mayed ego and force him to do his one little 
trick over and over." 

"You may be right about that," I conceded, 
"but after all, why should the branded one care 
so very much?" 

"He should care a great deal because he 
should wish to save his individuality, the only 
phase of him that amounts to anything. There 
is a struggle for life in the world of ideas the 
same as there is in the jungle A classified mind 
is a chained mind; it can no longer carry on 
the fight. Behold what the mania for classifi- 
cation has done! It has defaced the pages of 
history with soul cartoons. Woe unto the man 
who emphasizes a character trait in the pres- 
ence of the classifying foe. Has not King Ruf us 
been doomed to plunge forever through bosky 
dells after the festive wild boar? Could King 
Ruf us do anything else? Notice how Henry 
Vni marries with dizzy repetitions; how 
Charles I is always receiving the executioner's 
axe, and how Hannibal crosses the Alps with his 
shivering elephants. In more recent times our 
own Paul Revere, forgetting prudence, went 
forth on his steed. Did he ever do anything 
else? We know not, but history has classified 



DiESERT PLACES 2$ 

him for his riding and ordained that he shall 
ride forevermore." 

"Yes," I admitted, "history can be very nar- 
row and unjust to the individual, but it can not 
actually rob the living man of his personality. 
He can still live his own life and be himself in 
the city or the country." 

"I think you are mistaken there," he replied. 
"Living men are also classified. Even now I am 
fighting for my status as an individual. I really 
have a status worth defending, and in defend- 
ing it I fight against the very things that nor- 
mal men seem to love. I must resist being swal- 
lowed by their organizations. So many people 
want to be organized ; they worship institution- 
alism, ceremonies and forms, while I worship 
individuality. I do not wish to be drowned in 
their great Nirvana, their ocean of absorption ; 
I would much rather wade around alone in my 
own little puddle. Yet I have no desire to re- 
form or change the normal man's club, associa- 
tion, league, lodge or union. If he likes it, let 
him have it. I only resist the attempt of a clan 
to make me over on its own pattern; I am jeal- 
ous of my shell-shocked aloofness. War lined 
me up once too often. It is my special care now 
to refuse both the tag of a classified talent and 



30 DEKA PARSEC 

the insignia of an organized unit. I would be 
free to try all possible exploits. I am also mind- 
ful of the fact that an individualized man must 
be ever on his guard when expressing his own 
ideas, for, should his outpouring accidentally re- 
semble the standardized jargon of the Jub Jub 
Club, some one is sure to say: *I see you are a 
Jubjubist,' or worse by far, he may receive from 
that precious organization some token of its ap- 
proving ownership and thereby lose his own 
soul." 

"Do you not entirely overlook the augmented 
intellectuality of the city with its clubs and 
unions where minds coming into contact with 
minds are stimulated and improved?" I asked. 

"No," he replied, "I do not overlook that 
phase at all. A great naturalist once said : *Men 
kindle one another as do fire-brands, and beget 
a collective heat and enthusiasm that tyrannize 
over the individual purposes and wills.' It is the 
tyranny over individuality that I resent. The 
hive gives nothing to the bee. The bee gives 
everything to the hive. Even from the flower 
the bee gets only sweet water or nectar; she 
must add her own formic acid before honey is 
made. The natural man adds the formic acid of 
his own mind to the nectar that he finds every- 



DESERT PLACES 31 

where in the wild life of actuality and so makes 
the honey of thought. City minds are supplied 
with formic acid, but they have no nectar ; they 
live in a state of famine, and therefore when 
a gentle thinker from the thought-feeding fields 
enters the city desert he places himself in peril 
of ambuscade and robbery. Artificial people 
need his thoughts to save themselves from in- 
tellectual cannibalism. Let him feed them spar- 
ingly according to their digestive capacities, but 
also let him beware of the head-hunters, the 
fierce and hungry head-hunters of the Jub Jub 
Club." 



VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 

As I returned one day from a big league ball 
game I bought an evening paper and proceeded 
to read all about the game I had just seen. This 
post-game reading is an approved American 
custom. Walking and reading, I presently came 
to a vacant lot where boys were playing a ball 
game of their own. I forsook the newspaper for 
the time being and gave attention to the sand- 
lot activities. 

Very soon I noticed that one of the players 
was much larger than any of the others. A 
second glance showed that it was my shell- 
shocked friend. I had not seen him since the 
day we met on the railroad track. He was cov- 
ering third base, and doing it with such bound- 
less enthusiasm, that standing room on the bor- 
der of the field was soon taken up by the throng 
flowing from the big ball-ground. The action 
was fast and thrilling, but it was the last half 
of the ninth inning, and so our pleasure soon 
ended. The crowd melted away and I hastened 
to capture the third baseman. 

"So sorry the game is over," I said as soon as 
I had him in my safe possession. 

33 



34 I)EKA PAESEC 

"Yes," he answered with a boyish laugh as he 
mopped the perspiration from his brow, "it is 
too bad, and especially so when we realize that 
you can never read about this game — ^never, 
never read about it." His eyes danced in a kind 
of liquid fire that suggested merriment and 
mock regret. The moist handkerchief went 
from his face to a pocket and he struck a grand- 
oise attitude. 'Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him 
well!' The shade of the man I once was; the 
man who took his baseball by proxy, watching, 
watching other men as they played, and then 
reading, reading, ever reading all about it. *Alas, 
poor Yorick, I knew him well !' " 

"Let's change the subject," I suggested. 

"Let's do that very thing," he agreed hearti- 
ly. "What do we care for subjects? We've 
plenty of them." 

As we walked off the field I noticed that my 
playful friend was a little lame. He caught my 
glance, and, true to his habit, answered the un- 
asked question. "Yes, a trifling sprain in my 
left ankle ; got it in the game, not very bad, but 
just enough to put me on the car for down 
town." 

We found a seat in the section of the car 
where smoking is permitted. "1 have very few 



VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 35 

regrets," he commenced after we were seated, 
"but possibly the few I have are more poignant 
than the regrets of other people. One of my 
deprivations is the scattered and lost love for 
tobacco smoke; I can no longer enjoy a cigar, 
and so I will have to sing." 

He glided into the musical mood as automat- 
ically as other men glide into their own pockets 
for cigarettes and matches. He surprised me 
with the power of his voice and the variety of 
his selections. A cigar smoker in front of us 
turned to me and asked, "Taking him to a sani- 
tarium?" I nodded. "Poor man!" he sympa- 
thized. 

My singer heard the remark and nudged me 
in mischievous appreciation. 

"Let grand opera and the fumes of sweet 
nicotine mingle lovingly in the ambient atmos- 
phere," he warbled. 

"I'll take my atmosphere without the music," 
said a cigar across the aisle. 

"You said something. Buddy," answered the 
singer, "and I'll take mine without the smoke. 
He gave me another nudge. 

"Are you in charge of him?" asked the 
ruffled cigar. 

"Yes," I replied; "it is a case of tangled 



36 DEKA PAESEC 

nerves. He doesn't know any better, but he is 
good natured and wouldn't for the world de- 
prive any man of his smoke." 

"Oh, I see," said the cigar, pacified. "His 
music isn't half bad either, is it?" 

"No, it isn't," I agreed, "and more than that, 
he is a happy creature." At this I got another 
nudge from my singer, who was now counter- 
feiting an air of dignified pensiveness that 
raised him to a condition almost ethereal. 
"Didn't I tell you we had lots of subjects?" he 
reminded me in a triumphant aside. 

We left the car in the business district. "You 
must be hungry after the exercise you have had 
today," I said as we walked to the curb. He 
limped in an exaggerated manner to force upon 
me an unbecoming role of sympathy, or perhaps 
to express some subtle shade of humor just then 
flitting through his mind. 

"Must is the word," he returned. 

"Then you will have dinner with me," I said 
decisively. 

"An invitation from the king is always a com- 
mand," he replied with a grand air, "but no 
monarch wishes to have a sick man in his en- 
tourage." With these words his exaggerated 
lameness departed, while he conferred upon me 



VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 37 

an accent, a smile and a manner that only he 
could conjure up. 

I knew how his nature abhorred the main 
stream of city life, so we went to a little res- 
taurant and found a table in a retired nook. 

"Ah, bliss!'* he exclaimed, "bliss and exalta- 
tion, to be as hungry as a wolf and to find good 
food in this dear old world." Then with one 
of his sudden changes of thought, he rushed 
right on into another topic. "Something amus- 
ing happened a few days ago," he announced, 
and his smile became child-like. "A distant rel- 
ative of mine died." With that preliminary 
statement he paused and cast a sly glance at me 
as though he wished to note the effect of his 
words. 

I tried unsuccessfully to receive the informa- 
tion as a logical statement. "Amusing," I 
asked. 

"You wonder," he answered, "and I must 
hereby beg your pardon. Please do not misun- 
derstand. The amusing part of the incident 
lies in the fact that the distant relative left me 
a bequest of sixteen hundred dollars a year 
for life. He went so far as to put into his will 
a touch of philosophy to the effect that any true 
spider lover is by that token an institution of 



38 DEKA PARSEC 

the bipedal variety, and should be generously 
endowed. In strict accordance with that theory 
he endowed me. Behold an institution.'* 

"Accept my hearty congratulatins," I said 
reaching across the table to grasp his hand. 

"Ah, you also find the incident amusing, don't 
you?" he exclaimed, while the twinkle of new 
mischief played again in his mocking eyes. "I 
thought you were about to offer me consolation 
in my great sorrow. You have also, indeed, 
found it amusing ; our minds meet once more." 

"Well, no, not exactly," I protested, feeling 
somewhat discredited by my friend's whimsical 
pose. "I congratulated you on the assured in- 
come, but I have not found the incident at ull 
amusing." 

"Tut, tut, Old Man," he burst in, "you merely 
forgot my sorrow to felicitate me on my joy, 
a very natural mistake. Moreover I do not fish 
for condolences, but I still stick to the amus- 
ing part of this affair with my dear, distant and 
departed relative. It is droll that he should 
consider me an improvident and helpless mem- 
ber of society simply because I had been jarred 
out of a few dozen of my former conceits and 
jarred into a few dozen new ones." 

"Well, if the amusing feature carried any 



VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 39 

sting, we will have to forgive him, won't we?" 
I suggested by way of reconciliation. 

"Yes, yes, he is already forgiven, abundantly 
forgiven, but what in the world am I to do with 
an income of one hundred and twenty-five dol- 
lars a month ? Answer that riddle ?" 

"It is indeed a princely sum," I replied, "but 
there are persons in the world who, with a little 
coaxing might be led to assist you in the dis- 
bursement of that amount of money." 

"I see you do not quite understand," he went 
on. "You naturally think that I make light of 
this bequest, but not so. The sum is of course, 
measured by some standards, a paltry one; it 
would have seemed paltry to me when I was 
normal, but today it actually places me be- 
yond the visions of Croesus. I am the king of 
a modern Lydia, a vast psychic principality 
all torn up by high explosives and inhabited by 
a different race of ideas. In that sixteen hun- 
dred dollars a year is an ocean of wealth for 
me. Here's to that generous soul, my father's 
cousin; many glorious returns of his birthday 
into the land of his present abode." He held his 
glass of water aloft and I joined him in his 
toast. 

"I have an intuition that you do not even now 



40 DEKA PARSEC 

exactly catch my meaning," he proceeded. "You 
perhaps feel that I am flippant or lacking in sol- 
emn respect. Is it because your spirit has 
moved away just a little from the place where it 
stood that day on the mountain ?" 

A shadow passed over his face, like the 
shadow of a cloud over a summer landscape. 
His super-sensitive mind discovered my infer- 
ences. 

"You feel, when my words ride a wave of 
nervous levity, that I do not mourn in a seemly 
way for the one who was so kind to me. You 
are right in part, for I do not mourn. Death 
brushed me with its sable wing and yet I felt no 
claws in its feather tips. That same wing has 
now taken my good old relative wholly under 
its protecting care, and surely that must be 
good for him — he a hero of Gettysburg and a 
lover of wild nature. No, I do not mourn in 
hopelessness, but on the contrary rejoice in 
solemnity while the flag of my spirit flies at 
half-mast in honor of him. He intended all in 
kindness, but little did he realize how his money 
would burden me. He might as well have be- 
queathed potted geraniums to the state of Cali- 
fornia." 

"May it not have been that your wise rela- 



VICARIOUS ACTIVITIES 41 

tive knew how small are the financial returns 
from spider-loving and star-gazing?" I sug- 
gested. 

"Yes," he agreed, "that must have been his 
thought, for he could not have known that my 
nature-foibles ever led me into a practical, 
bread-winning occupation, but they have done 
so and I am actually a business man ; behold me, 
a capitain of a burro team ! Eight festive bur- 
ros have I, and over the long, rocky trail we ply 
our trade. Five days a week we work; two 
days we rest, and the world is mine." 

His face radiated mountain light ; I was con- 
scious of a potent influence, steaming out from 
his mind, a kind of witchery that evokes pic- 
tures of eyrie places and dusty trails. "Yes, 
I have an occupation now," he mused, gazing 
through and far beyond the walls of the room, 
an occupation that is different. Some day you 
shall meet Paloma, my leading burro. He is a 
beauty ! Behind his broad and hirsute counten- 
ance broods the soul of meditation; in his heart 
an everlasting tomorrow sings and gives prom- 
ise of fruition for all his aspirations and mine." 

My friend paused a moment as though he 
wished to interpret one of Paloma's medita- 
tions, but as I watched his face across the 



42 DEKA PARSEC 

table, in that fleeting moment, I saw the light 
of the mountains fade and die; the potent, 
streaming witchery of his mind returned to its 
spring, and he himself was back again in the 
little restaurant. "He will speak now of sane 
and wholesome things," I thought, and so he 
did. 

"This coffee is excellent," he said. 



CHARITY 

When I opened the envelope a spray of moun- 
tain sage fell out, telling me it was from my 
shell-shocked companion. I found a quiet place 
and read ; 

At Home, Lizard Lodge. 

Dear Friend — I was disappointed when you 
failed to meet me at Sierra Madre for another 
interview on the day appointed. You will have 
to think up a plausible excuse. Paloma has 
been shaking his ears in a distinguished way, 
giving me assurance of your health and safety. 
One of the precious things about my leading 
burro is that he never has any evil presenti- 
ments ; therefore I know that it was no misfor- 
tune which kept you away from the trysting 
place. 

Last night I watched the Big Dipper until its 
swing around the North Star was apparent even 
to my untrained eyes. Hypnotized by the starry 
multitude, I sat on a bench outside my cabin 
door and forgot the passing of time. When at 
last I took note, it was to realize, without look- 
ing at my watch, that the night was far spent. 

43 



44 DEKA PARSEC 

The familiar eating-sounds from the burro shed 
had long since ceased; not a cricket could be 
heard in the grass ; my little world was asleep. 
But I made good use of the stars, for they told 
me how to disburse the first installment of 
that troublesome inheritance; the letter carry- 
ing the money away is already in the mail. 

Possibly it was the creeping chill of the night 
which revived a memory picture, or, it may 
have been nothing more than worry over that 
money, but whatever it was, I saw again in 
fancy the sprawling village of Neufchateau, 
near the battle lines in France, and a poor old 
charcoal man I used to know, going from house 
to house with his push-cart, in the gray of the 
early morning. Under the cart, and harnessed 
to it, was his faithful, little dog, pulling with all 
his might. What an atom of life was that lit- 
tle dog! How he worked, and how his master 
worked ! Both were too old for war, but not too 
old for the remorseless struggle against death 
by starvation! At last, when memory con- 
ducted me to the place where a pitying house- 
wife gave scraps of food from her own scanty 
store to the old man and the little dog, I knew 
I had found the place for the first month's por- 
tion of my inheritance. How simple the dis- 



CHARITY 45 

bursement of money, after all! A few hours 
of pleasant meditation under the stars, an un- 
spoken question addressed to Ursa Major, and 
the deed is done. 

In the days before I met my shell, the giving 
of money to the poor and humble would have 
filled me with self-satisfaction. My soul would 
have luxuriated in that sense of thrift which 
comes only from the consciousness of accumu- 
lating treasure in Heaven. But now all is so 
different! No recording angel pats me on the 
back; no feehng of smug respectability abides 
with me, even for a moment. 1 am neither an 
organized nor an unorganized charity. I am no 
charity at all; I am merely a disbursing clerk, 
standing midway between my dear, old, de- 
ceased relative and the person who is to receive 
the money. How that exploding shell changed 
me! Today I regard the normal man's atti- 
tude toward benevolence as the height of ab- 
surdity. According to his theory, there must 
be poverty and wretchedness in the world for- 
ever; otherwise, how can his charitable and 
ministerial impulses continue to function? He 
believes in doing good, and he thinks that do- 
ing good is a part of being good. I don't think 
it is, because that brand of goodness rests upon 



46 DEKA PARSEC 

the vicious implication that some one else must 
be bad. According to my point of view, the only- 
possible cause for self-congratulation that a 
giver may have lies in the fact that he has tem- 
porarily solved the trifling problem of distrib- 
uting money. He has blessed himself by get- 
ting rid of the unnecessary. 

Ever since my nerves took on their high ten- 
sion I have found it impossible to base any kind 
of happiness or morality upon the assumption 
that other people are in a condition of financial 
wretchedness or moral obliquity. I now look 
upon all these things as temporary, and I can 
only predicate my own morality and my own 
sense of social congeniality upon the solid foun- 
dation of every other person's well-being. In 
other words, I like to assume that these mate- 
rial questions are answered and settled, and 
that we human beings now find ourselves in a 
world where no one is in need of physical or 
mental food which he can not easily secure. I 
like to imagine that I am with my equals; that 
I have the advantage of nobody, and that I 
must be a social creature on fair terms. My ec- 
centricity consists for one thing, in the fact that 
I must be satisfied with joys that gain no ac- 
centuation by being placed in contrast with 



CHARITY 47 

other people's miseries. I live already wholly 
within a philosophy which says that the only 
true relationship between persons is the one 
based on the assumption that life's best has 
been distributed to all and that no one can pos- 
sibly give any one else a tid-bit of charity. 

Of course you will wonder why I speculate on 
a civilization that has not yet arrived. I know 
very well it has not arrived, but when it does 
arrive it can do nothing more than make appar- 
ent the real basis of morals and social life. That 
basis is as true now as it will be then. The as- 
sumption that it has already arrived serves me 
as a working hypothesis, and so I live even now 
in a kind of millenium, but not of the orthodox 
type. The cake at my millennium feast does 
not have to be dipped in the blood of unfortu- 
nates to give it a rich flavor. Vicarious suffer- 
ing and sharp contrasts are eliminated as in- 
gredients of my happiness when I assume that 
things are as they should be. Why not regard 
life in that way ? Why wait ? 

Please do not infer that I minimize the good- 
ness of charity. I only say that it has no rele- 
vancy to our morals or social congeniality. It 
is only a gesture by means of which the giver 
relieves a mental disquietude of his own, while 



48 DEKA PARSEC 

alleviating the physical suffering of the re- 
ceiver. This is, of course, good within a limited 
domain, but it touches very lightly upon the real 
life of humanity. From this you will under- 
stand why my disbursement to the charcoal 
man and his little dog produced no moral thrills 
and no sense of piled-up treasure anywhere. 

This morning Paloma indulged in one of his 
major meditations; his right ear pointed to the 
zenith and his left one to the horizon. I have 
learned to read from these two positions the 
idea of suspended judgment. Paloma has a 
weighty matter under consideration, one which 
is difficult to settle. Of course, when he does 
settle it, he will not be able to express his con- 
clusions. All I can know is that he has settled 
the matter. After that his ears may droop 
like the arms of a semaphore, or they may point 
forward in anticipation, as is their custom when 
some moving object on the distant horizon at- 
tracts their owner's attention. When I first 
made the acquaintance of this introspective 
burro I thought it was a real misfortune that he 
could not give to the world the results of his 
cerebrations, but now I know that he really 
does give us the benefit of them and in the same 
way that other thinking creatures enlighten us. 



CHARITY 49 

Could he speak he might, just like any human 
being, conceal his real thoughts in words and 
thus build up a barrier between him and me. It 
was from him I first learned how terrific and 
awe-inspiring is the thing not spoken. From 
him I learned to be unafraid in solitude. I found 
that my consciousness took on different phases 
in the presence of different people, and that it 
was different when in the presence of my silent 
Paloma. He and I have no choice but to judge 
each other by the invisible, and, strangely 
enough, I find this is exactly the way that peo- 
ple judge each other. The spoken word is al- 
most nothing between them. What you are 
speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.' Was 
it not so between you and me when we first met 
on San Gabriel? The solitude of the mountain 
terrifies some minds because it brings them face 
to face with themselves. Each soul, that is, 
each normal soul, fears itself; each soul when 
alone with another soul fears that one also, be- 
cause between the two, as between Paloma and 
me, there is a transferance of unspoken 
thoughts that uncover dangerous deeps. The 
noises and amusements of the city were in- 
vented to dispel silent thoughts and to save nor- 
mal people from the horrors of involuntary self- 
revelation. All of this I learned from Paloma. 



50 DEKA PARSEC 

Oh, by the way, learning from Paloma recalls 
another incident, one which I found fully as 
amusing as the receipt of my inheritance. It 
happened a few days ago when I was on the 
high trail that skirts the precipice of Mt. Mark- 
ham. I saw a man crouching on the very edge 
of the cliff, peering into the abyss. It was an 
easy matter to slip up to him quietly and grasp 
him by the arm. I did this, by way of precau- 
tion, before speaking, and then I casually re- 
marked that the scenery was grand. He started 
violently and looked at me abashed. I saw that 
he had been in the throes of self-pity. I used 
to be the same way when I was normal. 

"You understand, don't you?'* he stammered 
with good dramatic effect, and I assured him 
that I did. Then he explained that he had lost 
all his property, all his money, his good name, 
all his friends, evei'y vestige of his nerve and 
his youth. 

"Is that all?" I asked, and I put plenty of 
stress on the word "that." 

He hesitated, as even a dying man will, when 
a lady figures in the case, but his desperation 
knew no limits. "No," he continued, "that is 
not all. I have been tragically disappointed in 
love." 



CHARITY 51 

Little by little I got his story and fathomed 
the full depth of his woes, or, to put it in an- 
other way, I obtained a complete catalogue of 
things that had slipped away from him. Never- 
theless I had a conviction that he had missed 
still other and more important experiences' by 
the fault of never having lived them at all, and 
so I asked him a few pointed questions. The 
result was a shameful disclosure. Ponder and 
be astonished! He thought a spider had six 
legs, and that mourning doves nested in trees. 
He believed that the cicada sang with its vocal 
cords like a star in grand opera, and that sage 
brush would grow in a swamp. When I told 
him that a mule had no hope of posterity it was 
real news to him. He had never met a mother 
spider carrying her whole family on her back, 
nor had he ever noticed that the limbs of trees, 
near the ocean, stream in the direction of the 
prevailing winds. It would not have surprised 
him to see a thunder storm move from the east 
to the west. He knew nothing about bugs, 
worms, snakes, birds, trees, clouds or the way 
to catch a trout. 

"Why all these trivial questions?" he com- 
plained at last, tugging a little, but not too 
much, against my firm hold on his arm, and 



52 DEKA PARSEC 

shuffling his feet carefully over the edge of 
the cliff. 

"Oh, as to that," I replied, "I only thought 
you might want to learn a little about this world 
yet before you died." 

"Man," he exclaimed, his anger visibly 
aroused, "are you crazy?" 

"Yes, certainly," I admitted readily enough, 
"that is, I'm shell-shocked out of all desire to 
see a man die in his ignorance." 

I am sure you understand how no one could 
commit suicide gracefully under my auspices 
after that. The stranger came to the cabin with 
me, met Paloma, spent the night there as our 
guest, and the next morning went out into the 
beautiful world again with the sprouting wings 
of a shocking theory of life. 

"Nothing seems to matter up here, does it?" 
he said with emphasis as he left my door, and 
to this I replied that nothing really mattered 
except the insects and birds and burros and a 
few men scattered among the mountains, never 
forgetting the countless stars that keep vigil 
over all with the sun and moon, while the whole 
universe looks on. Beyond these odds and ends, 
I assured him, nothing should give us any 
worry. 



CHARITY 53 

And now, my dear friend, I must end this 

letter. Meet me soon on the trail above the 

five-thousand foot level, for I have matters of 

importance to take up in your living presence. 

Sincerely, 

HE OF THE SPIDERS. 



LIZARD LODGE 

It was my first night at Lizard Lodge. The 
fire-place glowed cherry-red as the flames slowly 
shortened to the surface of the embers. At 
every snap of the cooling log a shower of sparks 
went swirling up the chimney. A knotty torch 
exploded and fell in fragments, rolling down the 
fiery slope into the ashes. 

"There goes another castle of dreams," said 
my friend. 

His face, warm and rosy in the flickering 
light, seemed to have no material existence sep- 
arate from the images that the flames evoked. 
When he thought of embers he was himself a 
glowing ember. 

"Ashes to ashes," he continued pensively; 
"but that means cheer in my fire-place, not 
death. Life comes along, like a wave, and lifts 
inert matter out of its aged stillness in the 
rocks, makes it a part of life itself, and then 
some day passes on, leaving it to fall back into 
the rocks again. How many times in the future 
will these same ashes be lifted up by this mir- 
acle and built into the bodies of other trees?" 

55 



56 DEKA PARSEC 

"Many times, I am sure," I agreed. 

"Yes, many times," he repeated; then sud- 
denly executing one of his characteristic 
changes, he plunged into other subjects. "That 
flaming knot was alive with visions of dancing 
people, women's skirts, horrified moralists, law- 
makers, speculating scientists and plausible 
sentimentahsts." 

"Have you opinions regarding dancing and 
skirts?" I asked, unable wholly to conceal my 
surprise. 

"Yes," he answered in an even tone, "opinions 
about atoms, electrons, dancing skirts, national 
reform societies, and everything, but first, to 
lead up to the reasons for my precious opinions, 
I would explain that there is a misty borderland 
lying between the kingdom of science and the 
kingdom of sentiment. It is a mere ribbon of 
psychic land. Science with its disinterested, 
impersonal, fact-seeking thought, comes up to 
that frontier on one side, while sentiment, with 
its religious, literary, mystic, speculative and 
emotional thought, comes up on the other. Be- 
tween these two realms I live. It is the very 
place where our old friend, the atom of science, 
abdicates to the electron, which in turn falls 



LIZARD LODGE 57 

into the arms of a mystic spirit. Interesting 
things happen along this frontier of mine." 

"It appears to me," I ventured to say, "that 
you Hve wholly in the kingdom of sentiment or 
emotion, and, I might add, religion." 

"That is because you are more scientific than 
human-centered in your proof requirements," 
he observed, "Religious and literary people 
think I am a materialist, especially when I dis- 
cuss dancing and morals. They charge me with 
being un-human, if not, indeed, inhuman. When 
I tell them that nature is neither for us nor 
against us, they answer that God made nature 
for us. Yet, when I see God in the stars and 
insects ; when I see everything as a part of God, 
my scientific critics say I am laboring under a 
religious illusion. 

"Looking into the scientific country in one 
direction from my narrow territory, I observe 
people thinking without fear or pride or sense 
of sin; they are utterly impersonal. Their 
thoughts respect no gods and play into the 
hands of no favorites. They hate superstition 
and suspect the word of authority. On the 
other side of my domain I see a still larger coun- 
try, where literature and religion arise from 
emotion ; it is an irrational but a beautiful land. 



58 DEKA PARSEC 

It is the home of literary mastei'pieces whose 
figures are heroic sinners, devils, witches, or- 
acles, prophets, sibyls and that whole hierarchy 
of entities that science is putting to death. If 
I leave my strip of empire and go far in this 
direction I soon lose my way. If I turn in the 
other direction I meet scientists hot on the trail 
of some new figment or theory. Just now it is 
their electron, that material thing which melts 
into spirit. They must keep up with it as fox 
hunters keep up with their game. Even now 
these valiant hunters are waging battle for it 
with metaphysicians and mystics who declare 
that all is spirit. The cowering electron, in the 
meantime not knowing itself for a body or a 
ghost, takes refuge in my neutral zone." 

"Do you never feel like taking sides in these 
disputes ?" I asked. 

"No," he repHed ; "it would be more profitable 
to talk them over with Paloma. When I was 
normal I knew nothing about this psychic strip, 
where so many things meet and go away again 
unloved and unnamed. I once thought there 
could be no right side. Now I see that there 
may be two rights at the same time. Any point 
on a sphere may be a pole. It is all in the point 
of view. Not all the fox hunters come from the 



LIZARD LODGE 59 

scientific side ; many come from the sentimental 
and overtake their game in my parish. Indeed, 
it seems that all turbulence, strife, propaganda 
and social movements, sooner or later exhaust 
themselves in the region of neutral thougEt 
where I hold forth. They neutralize each other 
because no one really knows the vital facts. 
Just now moral crusaders and reformers are 
trying to stampede the youth of America, but 
our young people will win a place for many of 
their so-called immoralities, just as their par- 
ents and grand-parents won before them. In 
the days of our ancestors, doleful prophets had 
visions of a world dying in its sins. The world 
is always dying. Let it die. Something is also 
always being bom, and this something that is 
being bom will take efficient care of the earth. 
I don't care where or when the crusaders and 
crusaded decide to sign their treaty of peace. 
There is nothing poignant about this drama. 
Up here among my burros and insects, with my 
singing birds and the sweet loves of nature, all 
is well. No one is compelled to be a reformer. 
He is free to become a villain. His decision can 
in no way affect my peace of mind." 

"Do you not think you owe anything to so- 
ciety?" I asked. 



60 DEKA PARSEC 

"Oh, yes, I owe the duty of keeping my soul's 
interior in order but nothing else. I have never 
joined the Pass-A-Law-Against-It Society. I 
am free to admire women's dresses, which, by 
the way, are more beautiful now than they have 
ever been in the annals of styles. My morality 
is not injured by the ocular demonstration that 
women do not move about on casters, like fur- 
niture. This is a physiological fact, and what 
of it ? Even if my morals had been lost beyond 
recall, that in itself could not justify the re- 
formation of skirts. I am the custodian of my 
own morals. If I am unable to guard them 
against the honest facts of physiology I am 
lost. Dress reformers are only shadow fighters. 
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral 
skirt. There is nothing disgraceful about the 
human body. The women of today are doing 
something constructive and worth while in thus 
overcoming the shamef ulness that superstitious 
religions of a by-gone age attached to the bodies 
we wear." 

"The dance is also coming in for much crit- 
icism," I remarked, "and it seems to me that it 
has about reached the bottom, with its jazz 
noise and queer contortions." 

"Yes, as a form of expression, it is over- 
emphasized," he admitted, "but I have no quar- 



LIZARD LODGE 61 

rel with the dance or its devotees, and no sym- 
pathy for the moralist who would abolish it. 
The dance is not my form of symbolism, but it 
gives pleasure to other people. No one has any 
right to take it away from them. Dancing, like 
dress, can be neither moral nor immoral.. Its 
basis is sex attraction, and that is another thing 
which has been debased by superstitious cus- 
toms. Dancers may express sensuality if their 
minds are sensual ; they may smirch any other 
symbol in the same way. Hypocrites may 
dance, but not all dancers are h3T)ocrites. The 
universe is a mixture of things good and bad as 
seen from man's tower of observation, but the 
universe was not made for him; he is only one 
of the infinitesimal incidents in it. He must 
make choice between the opposites he finds 
strewn on the floor of the infinite. No Pass-A- 
Law-Club need worry about public morality; 
the public has no positive morality; that is an 
individual attribute, self -controlled, or not con- 
trolled at all. From my vantage-point of the 
super-sensuous, I see capable, sensible people of 
this day picking their way through the laby- 
rinths of good and bad — finding what is good 
for them, and also what is bad — but their sal- 
vation is in their own hands, never in the hands 
of the Pass-A-Law-Against-It Society. If there 



62 DEKA PARSEC 

is on this earth such a thing as an abstract, 
absolute goodness, it can only appeal to man in 
the form of an invitation, not a command. The 
goodness within will not seek badness without. 
It will accept the invitation of good. It accepts 
but never surrenders." 

The log collapsed in one last, fitful flame and 
all was dark. My friend arose and I followed 
him out of the cabin into the cool night air. 
The Sickle and Ursa Major burned in glory just 
over the mountain top. Far away in the canon 
coyotes were holding a concert. "Just think," 
my friend exclaimed, ''down in the lowlands, in 
the cities, around the world, with planets and 
stars above the earth and below it, with the 
earth itself a shining planet in the heavens, 
human beings are ignoring it all — they for 
whom some believe this universe was made — 
ignoring it all, while they devote themselves 
solely to the measuring of skirts!" 

We pondered a few minutes under the im- 
personal stars. They vouchsafed us no revela- 
tion on the ways of men. Down in the canon 
the coyotes went on with their concert, while 
an owl, somewhere in the trees, complained to 
the night. 



THE COUNT 



The light of day had faded into a dull red 
along the western horizon when I approached 
Lizard Lodge, after a hard tramp on the moun- 
tain trails. The old, familiar eating sounds 
proceeded from the burro shed as I passed, 
while savory odors of supper with the aroma of 
coffee drifted out from the Master's cabin. How 
dear to the heart are domestic sounds and odors ! 

"Good evening, Deka Parsec," I greeted, as I 
framed myself in the open door. My good 
friend was standing by the stove; in one hand 
he held a dish-cloth and in the other a fork. 
On the fork several pieces of sizzling bacon were 
impaled, while others smoked in the frying pan. 

"Enter and welcome to the hospitalities of 
Lizard Lodge," he shouted, making at the same 
time a whimsical bow and a ceremonious sweep 
of the dish-cloth. He looked like a troubadour 
of old. 

"Thank you very kindly, Deka Parsec," I said 
as we met in a hearty handshake. 

"Eliminate the French, if you please, and take 
a chair by the table. Supper is almost ready." 

63 



64 DEKA PARSEC 

"That is not French," I corrected. "That's 
your new name. The committee on names here- 
by reports. I am the committee and the hon- 
orable chairman thereof, as per your author- 
ity to me given on that day when you said that 
high explosives made your old name forever a 
misnomer. You are now Deka Parsec." 

The Master of the Lodge solemnity filled two 
glasses with water and handed me one. He 
held his glass aloft and looked at me. "Here's 
to Deka Parsec," I said impressively, "may he 
live long and reveal all his honest convictions." 
"The deed is done," he added, and then we 
drank the cold water and set our glasses down 
in unison, after the manner of men who offi- 
ciate at sacred rites. 

"Now that's settled," said Deka Parsec with 
a merry laugh, "and may I ask," he continued, 
"how you happened to choose the name ?" 

"I am almost ashamed to confess," I an- 
swered, "but the truth is I merely took the 
name of a great mystic who once lived in Ara- 
bia, the kind-hearted Cesrap Aked, and turned 
the name around to disguise it. I had long 
since given up all hope of finding a name 
that in itself could be truly representative of 
you." 



THE COUNT 65 

"Well, that is an odd circumstance/' he con- 
tinued, "for you found a measuring or symboli- 
cal word after all. ^Dekaparsec' is a unit of 
measure for distances inconceivable, used by as- 
tronomers ; it represents the distance that light 
travels in thirty-two and six-tenths years, flash- 
ing through space at the speed of one hundred 
and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Thus 
you have decreed that I share alone with the 
most gigantic foot-rule in the universe the 
power of measuring all save the infinite. You 
have unwittingly worked according to specifica- 
tions and built better than you knew. And 
now let us eat." 

There is no sauce like hunger and no tonic 
like mountain air. With both of them favor- 
ing me, I found the supper at Lizard Lodge a 
feast fit for the gods. When it was over and 
we found ourselves before the fire-place again, 
I asked my friend for the news of the mountain 
since my former visit. 

"Did I ever speak of my old friend Count 
Taprobana V he began. 

"No, Deka," I answered, "you have never 
mentioned any of your old friends." 

"Well," he proceeded with a reminiscent 
smile, "one of the interesting phases of my 
shell-shocked world is that it brings me strange 



66 DEKA PARSEC 

and eccentric personalities with whom I am able 
to live on terms of congenial friendship. Count 
Taprobana is a man who lives in a world of odor 
like a dog. But for my speeded-up nerves I 
could never have entered into the spirit of his 
unique discourse on effluvium. I surprised the 
Count one day on the Mt. Lowe Trail, as he 
stood in rapture breathing the perfume of flow- 
ering sage and manzanita. We had met before 
in other lands across the sea. It is our custom, 
at each successive meeting, to take up a sun- 
dered and unfinished conversation on odors — to 
take it up just where we left it, and to carry it 
on into the unexplored regions of effluvium. We 
came to this mutual understanding because at 
our first meeting we found ourselves loving the 
same thing — the soul of a rose. I displayed an 
elementary knowledge of odor on that occasion 
by classifying eau de senteur as a synthetic or 
artificial perfume. The Count was pleased, and 
by the grace of our friendship at first sight, 
he waxed confidential and told me that he was 
capable of appreciating delicate gradations of 
odor far beyond the preception of all other 
men." 

"And what did the Count think of our moun- 
tains?" I asked. 

Deka laughed softly. "I must explain an- 



THE COUNT 67 

other phase of shell shock," he confided. "It is 
the impossibility of giving you the substance 
of a conversation like this one with Count Ta- 
probana, but I can give you the conversation 
itself, word for word, as a phonograph would 
give it." 

"That is better yet," I said, and Deka, gazing 
into the embers, began his story : 

"Ah, my pupil," the Count exclaimed, "We 
meet again; let me see — we were discussing 
frankincense and myrrh. Yes, after inspecting 
the perfume factory at Grasse, our conversa- 
tion turned to the powerful, medicinal perfumes 
of the Orient, and we reviewed the events of 
our last expedition for Siberian musk." 

"You are right Count," I repHed, "and then 
you took me for a walk through the grounds 
of your estate." 

"Once more, in fancy, I saw the Count's cha- 
teau nestling among the flowers midway be- 
tween the descending Alps and the Mediter- 
ranean. Ages ago, so the legend runs, the god- 
dess of sweet odors breathed upon the meadows 
of Taprobana, commanding the airs of the 
mountains to meet the airs of the sea and there 
to kiss into being the souls of the flowers. This 
is the true reason, so the natives say, why the 



68 BEKA PARSEC 

village of Grasse in Southeastern France is the 
perfumery capital of the world." 

"Yes," the Count continued, "we were dis- 
cussing oriental incense and the custom of the 
eastern ladies to stifle and woo their lovers in 
the occult fumes of frankincense and myrrh, or 
to lure them by the more earthly and sensual 
appeal of musk." 

"We were following the trail at a leisurely 
pace. The Count plucked a spray of flowering 
sage and tested its fragrance with the uncon- 
scious and habitual manner of a true connois- 
seur." 

"Oh!" he exclaimed, as we rounded a curve 
in the path, "Inspiration Point! I could never 
forget it. Yes, it is indeed a place of inspira- 
tion; it is glorious, but after all, it inspires 
by color and form alone. I have only to give 
myself up to the medium of odor and I may 
breathe the very soul of the cosmos. It is then 
that I touch the infinite. How may I tell man- 
kind of these sensations ? Odor is the vapor of 
music, the language of love, and the proof of 
a reality transcending our three-dimensional 
universe. It floats gossamer-webbed through 
the ethereal spaces and broods over our hearts 
in twilight harmonies. It bums like a flame of 
eternal ecstasy. It is a diaphanous fabric woven 



THE COUNT 69 

from solid things, a veil of electrons fluttering 
between mind and matter." 

"The Count paused while he gazed across the 
expanse of lowlands stretching from the base 
of the mountains to the sea." 'What a lovely- 
prospect," he exclaimed. "How exquisite all 
these colors; how celestial these perfumes! 
Surely, at last I sense the bouquet, the grand 
symphony of California." 

"He closed his eyes and was silent for a few 
minutes, lost in the land of effluvium. Like a 
hound he sniif ed up the wind and sought odori- 
ferous information from the infinite. He seemed 
to be receiving messages from worlds far be- 
yond my ken. Then, with a little sigh of re- 
gret, he came back to earth." 

"Did I tell you at Grasse," he resumed, "that 
every person is a bouquet of odor, each in ac- 
cordance with his own personality, and each by 
virtue of that aroma in his soul ?" 

"Yes," I replied, "but your remarks were in- 
terrupted by the arrival of the stage from 
Nice. It was the day you left France for Cey- 
lon." 

"So it was, so it was," said the Count, "I had 
it in mind then to explain that we ourselves con- 
stitute exquisite tones and overtones in frag- 



70 DEKA PARSEC 

ranee. These human bouquets are distilled and 
combined by the alchemy of our thoughts. Ex- 
pressed in terms of music, we are chords, har- 
monies, melodies or symphonies. You, for ex- 
ample, my congenial friend, are a bouquet in 
chord C, made up of santal, geranium, acacia, 
orange blossom and camphor. This bouquet is 
the index of your soul and is understood and 
appreciated by dogs and super-dogs. In the uni- 
verse of odor I am a super-dog. 

"A lady of refinement knows by intuition 
what melody sings itself through her individual 
domain of fragrance, and when, as a concession 
to a world obtuse in knowledge of odor, she pur- 
chases a commercial perfume, she tries to find 
one that agrees with her individual song. If 
her heart radiates sweet golden-rod and mag- 
nolia she will not scent her fabrics with iris or 
eau de cologne. Commercial perfume can not 
overcome the subtle vapor of individuality, but 
it can produce painful discords. A person whose 
mind exhales attar of roses or jonquils, would 
suffer like a victim on the rack if subjected to 
the fumes of the oriental seraglios, where musk, 
civet and sandal-wood reek like steam from a 
caldron. Even frankincense and myrrh, with 
all their religious associations, would strike dis- 
cords in a soul redolent with azalea, heliotrope 



THE COUNT 71 

and mignonette. Ah, yes, odors symbolize hu- 
man souls. Do you remember little Georgette 
of Nice? She had the spirit of lavender — and 
there was Marie, the pretty girl you met at 
Lyons. She was truly the twin sister of thyme, 
and the sweetheart of an apple blossom." 

"And what of the cities, Count?" I asked 
when he paused again. "Did you not tell me 
once that there is a bouquet for each city in the 
world?" 

"Yes, the spirit of a city is the composite 
spirit of all its inhabitants. I am in rapport 
with Paris; it is my dear friend, and more. 
It is like a tropical shore that has the power to 
throw its odorous breath over the vast spaces 
before it, and I am lulled by a strange intoxica- 
tion long before I see a tower or spire of the city 
itself. What is this bouquet, this farflung web 
of witchery ? It is a magic blend — the aroma of 
burning faggots, the sweetness of grass after a 
shower, cinnamon and cedar, roses, bergamot 
and iris, the subtle air from old tapestry, and 
perhaps a suggestion of pungent odors like the 
ones that emanate from the poison cabinet of 
Catherine de Medici at Blois. Super-dogs even 
detect the odor of blood in the Place de Greve, 
but the guillotine worked for a short season 
only, while every spring we have apple bios- 



72 DEKA PARSEC 

soms. The sweet odors of the great city, like 
the virtues of its people, overwhelm the bad and 
produce the bouquet adorable." 

"Just then a humming bird darted past us. 
Count Taprobana forgot his beloved Paris and 
was away on the chase. He did not catch the 
bird, but he discovered a rare flower and a new 
odor in a thicket where the chase had led him. 
Before we parted I requested him to give mt the 
odoriferous horoscope for Los Angeles. He 
promised to have it ready for my delectation 
when we meet again." 

Deka Parsec finished his story with a little 
laugh, and tossed another log on the fire. "I 
wonder where my dear Count is now," he mused 
— "inhaling the miasma of Borneo — very likely, 
or he may be dreaming over the lotus flowers of 
Egypt." 

"If Count Taprobana should ever come to 
Lizard Lodge, send for me at once," I ordered, 
"for I would have him classify the matchless 
symphony produced by the aroma of coffee and 
the odor of frying bacon as they mingle and 
float upon the cold, hungry air of the mountain. 



CEREMONY 

At Home, Lizard Lodge. 
Dear Friend : 

On my last trip up from Sierra Madre I 
brought a large package of magazines and news- 
papers. Paloma, as leading burro, was given 
the honor of carrying all this literature, and 
he seemed fully conscious of the dignity. 

I have not gone very far into the mass of 
Sunday papers and serious magazines at this 
writing, because it is my custom first to absorb 
all the wisdom to be found in the humorous pub- 
lications — those precious periodicals that have 
the liberty of telling truths without incurring 
the displeasure of sad-minded people. 

"Excuse me, God, there's the 'phone," sa*d a 
lady at her prayers. 

This joke appeared in one of the magazines, 
which, in its wayward spirit, says what^dver 
passes through its mind. Now, you may re- 
member that since the day when you named 
me, I have been the proud possessor of one 
additional attribute ; I mean the quality of meas- 
uring states of mind and weighing ideas. Deka 

73 



74 DEKA PARSEC 

Parsec must live up to his name. Accordingly 
I tried to discover the basis of the humor, or 
alleged humor, of this prayer joke, and I came 
to the conclusion that it acquired force as a 
jest, if it is a jest at all, from the universal 
custom of approaching God in a solemn, sad 
and cringing mood, as an abject subject ap- 
proaches a king. The typical earthly king, ac- 
cording to history, is in a state of constant 
flutter regarding his own prerogatives and the 
marks of kingly honor that must be accorded 
him. It is unimaginable that one of his grov- 
eling subjects should ask him to wait while the 
clanging of a telephone is stilled. But if a 
slave dare not ask an earthly king to stand by 
while a simple duty is discharged, how infinitely 
presumptuous was the lady at her prayers who 
put her God on the waiting list ? Yes, the mag- 
azine joke-smith, schooled in the etiquette of 
royal courts, thought this was the acme of in- 
congruity and hence very good humor; at least 
good after a manner of thinking. 

The more I thought about this jest the more 
I came to feel that it was without the elements 
of humor ; it merely stated a fact. It reminded 
me of another ancedote. It is said that a great 
man, upon whose shoulders there rested the 
burdens of a nation, was walking alone in a 



CEREMONY 75 

quiet lane, when he met a Httle boy who asked 
him to hold his toys. The great man accepted 
the commission and stood meekly waiting while 
the boy climbed a tree for some ripe cherries 
that had tempted him. It would have meant 
nothing to the boy had he known that a Prime 
Minister was his servant; the great man per- 
formed the service in a happy and spontaneous 
way without a thought of exacting from the 
child any homage or signs of humihty. This 
story was not supposed to contain any humor. 
We are told to draw from it the lesson that 
true greatness in human beings never exacts 
any marks of servility or artificial tokens of re- 
spect. Only insignificant kings or barbarous 
chieftains demand such expressions from their 
slaves. Many other stories with the same moral 
are told, but when I apply my foot-rule to this 
one, I find that we all admire a sense of humor 
and the democratic spirit. We are sHpping ever 
farther and farther away from kingly worship. 
Even our metaphors and comparison contain 
few royal allusions. "Happy as a king," is a 
phrase that strikes a discordant note, for kings 
are no longer happy. Fav/ning and adulation on 
the part of their subjects are things of the 
past, and these were once the food of kings. 
In the heart of mankind there is now a love 



76 DEKA PARSEC 

for little children and an appreciation of their 
naive ways. There is also a love for animals 
whose rights we recognize and respect. Our 
democracy is spreading out beyond the confines 
of mere humanity and is taking in all living 
things. 

Having applied the Deka Parsec rule to these 
sentiments which are so universal in our day, 
I returned to the jest of the lady at her prayers. 
Here we have a person on such intimate terms 
with her God that she does not hesitate to ex- 
cuse herself for a moment to answer the tele- 
phone. In the light of such an intimacy all 
humor of the joke-maker vanishes. The lady's 
conception of God contained no monarchial trap- 
pings, no scepter, no imperial attributes, no 
hurling of edicts from a lofty throne; indeed, 
her conception could not have contained any 
throne at all. It was with her as though she 
had been chatting with her earthly father when 
the telephone bell rang. "Excuse me. Daddy," 
she would have said, "there's the phone." And 
Daddy would not have been peevish about it. 
for he occupies no royal dias, but something far 
better, a cozy corner in his daughter's heart. 

We can imagine the lady of the magazine joke 
having a hearty laugh with her God, for a God 
that does not sit on an old-fashioned, imperial. 



CEREMONY 77 

barbarous throne, can unbend and laugh with 
his children — He who must know the infinitude 
of laughter and joy. He can hold his children's 
toys while they climb trees. He is never in 
danger of losing the glory that is eternal when 
His children hold in their minds and hearts a 
conception of Him which is love transformed into 
terms that finite beings can understand. It is 
evident that the lady of the prayer had dis- 
covered in her God an inexhaustible supply of 
innocent joys, laughter, comradeship and pa- 
ternal love. 

Before I was shell-shocked I took it as a mat- 
ter of course that when a person approached 
his God he must become solemn, cringing, sin- 
conscious and unworthy. This impression was 
accentuated in my mind by the fact that my in- 
structors always managed to have God asso- 
ciated with death, punishments, rewards, mel- 
ancholy sermons and funeral wreaths. The im- 
agery of old discourses on religion led me to 
think that God was like an earthly king. When 
I informed myself regarding the qualities of 
kings I found that, for the most part in history, 
they suffered from perpetual grouches and were 
ever hungering for tokens of servility from 
their hapless subjects. Everything was so sol- 
emn with them that they needed the assistance 



78 DEKA PARSEC 

of buffoons or court jesters to put them in a 
livable mood. 

In my present shell-shocked condition I see 
no wisdom in the words of any historical figures 
that grouped themselves about the thrones, ex- 
cept the words of the hired fools. They were 
permitted to tell the truth, and often did so. 
From them I learned that we are not really 
fit to live until we shed our solemnity, and not 
ready to die until we realize that all is vanity. 
Who has the right to say that God never ap- 
preciates a joke? If all things finite are a part 
of the infinite, there must be an eternal reser- 
voir of humor. 

What basis is there in rational thought for 
believing that God enjoys nothing but the cring- 
ing, servile, fear-haunted and contemptible 
qualities in His creatures ? When I was normal 
I took it for granted that a finite creature must 
give every outward manifestation of his insig- 
nificance when approaching the Infinite, but now 
that I am in a world of my own, this is anything 
but obvious to me. It seems now that God made 
sunshine as well as shadow, and that normal 
people all emphasize the shadow. They darken 
their church windows to keep out the light of 
day and they symbolize the passing of their 
friends into the next world by wearing black 



CEREMONY 79 

clothes. Even the Indian Medicine Man, who 
knows no classical theory, is a solemn creature. 
The nearer he gets to his God the less joy he 
expresses. A hearty laugh would be fatal to 
his fearsome hocus pocus. Religious authority 
everywhere, among the civilized and the uncivil- 
ized, is prone to wear a long face. 

Since the time when I was in the hospital — 
that no-man's land between this world and the 
next — ^my communications with the Infinite 
have been shorn of awe, humility, unworthiness 
and cowardice. I am not now conscious of hav- 
ing any self-seeking honors to bestow upon sub- 
limity. Kings, gods, angels, fairies and human 
beings all mix on equal footing in my un-the- 
ological democracy. 

When I was normal the cowardice of ancient 
times clung like a rag to the form of my wor- 
ship. The exploding shell tore that rag away 
with other rags. Today I have more patriotic 
sentiment than I ever had before. I have lost 
the ceremonious expression of religion and pa- 
triotism but not the sentiments themselves. 
The over-solemnity associated with things re- 
ligious is something like the military salute, a 
meaningless form. The salute is a relic of 
feudal times when one man was not as good as 
another before the law. There is nothing in it 



80 DEKA PARSEC 

that can increase a man's native patriotism or 
charm into existence any love or respect if these 
feelings are absent from his soul; neither does 
it in any way strengthen military discipline or 
further the laudable purposes of a patriotic 
army ; it is only a gratuitous symbol of a slav- 
ery that no longer exists, either in theory or 
fact. 

Perhaps the sadness and ceremony so evident 
in religion have their apologists, but I remem- 
ber very well that, when in my former state, I 
was instructed to pull over my head a kind 
of melancholy hood before communicating with 
God, I had a very strong inclination not to com- 
municate at all. When I had no complaints to 
make I had nothing to say to God, for be it re- 
membered, while I was normal I felt that it was 
wrong to tell Him any jokes or to make Him a 
party in felicitations. If my youthful and 
grateful heart overflowed with song I was any- 
thing but ceremonious and solemn in my tenden- 
cies; at such times I was happy, and as happi- 
ness was taboo in realms religious, I went else- 
where with my exuberance. But in my present 
state the difference between me and normal peo- 
ple is that I am just as likely to tell God a fool- 
ish thing as a wise one. I am far more inclined 
to rejoice with Him over the sweets of this 



CEREMONY 81 

world than to mourn over its sadness. Shell- 
shock has taken from me all my ancient cere- 
mony of woe. 

Excuse me, there's Paloma calling. 
As ever, 

DEKA PARSEC. 



HELPING TO BUILD ROME 

Deka Parsec's letter moved me to visit Lizard 
Lodge again. I came with the hope of finding 
him in a reminiscent mood that might lead to 
some tale of battle horror, but battle horrors 
did not lie near his fountain of expression that 
night. 

"Did I tell you about my trip to Rome?" he 
began when we had taken our places by the cozy 
fireplace. 

"No, Deka," I answered, and settled myself 
comfortably into the rustic arm chair. 

"Well," he continued, "when I had recov- 
ered sufficiently from my first stage of shock 
and could be classified with the convalescents, 
they let me go with a sergeant on leave to Italy, 
I remember it as the time when I helped to build 
Rome." 

"Historians have always failed to suggest, 
in their tales of human weal and woe, the vivid 
emotions that actual historic scenes call up in 
my soul. I believe they fail in the same way 
with other souls. None of the writers, whose 

83 



84 DEKA PARSEC 

books I read in my youth, even hinted at the 
awe, tinged with an exalted joy, which Rome 
evoked when I stood in her august presence. 
Perhaps I should thank the prosaic authors who 
compiled cold-blooded histories. Their negli- 
gence and lack of imagination left everything 
for me to discover alone. They made it possi- 
ble for me to be surprised at the actuality of 
Rome, but they also cheated me out of a fortune, 
which I might have enjoyed, bit by bit, during 
the years when I viewed history from afar. 
Had the historians who ministered unto my 
childhood, not couched their message in a stand- 
ardized jargon, and had they not deemed it un- 
professional to discover and reveal the honest 
emotions of historical figures, I would have gar- 
nered treasures from the books they gave me, 
but, after reading their versions, it remained 
for me to visit Rome, and there, in the presence 
of mighty symbols, to cast out forever the sta- 
tistical concepts that had formed my picture. 

No historian had even given me a hint that 
the ruins of the Forum would conjure up in my 
mind a disturbing vision of myself. They had 
merely given me names and dates, leaving out 
human associations and the magic power of 
actual scenes. They left out the better par-t of 
history. Where had I been during all the cen- 



HELPING TO BUILD ROME 85 

turies of sunshine and rain that transformed 
the noble edifices of the Forum into the shape- 
less ruins of today ? Where had I been through- 
out the centuries, throughout eternity? With- 
in the walls of the Colosseum near the Forum, 
are castles of feudal lords. Many centuries had 
elapsed between the days of Vespasian, when 
the Colosseum was new, and the time when the 
insignificant castles took form in the deserted 
arena, but today all are in ruins, the outer and 
the inner, the old and the new. A thousand 
years passed before the coming of the outlaw 
knights, and still another thousand years have 
buried their names forever." 

The faraway stare of revery dreamed in 
Deka's eyes. For him the fire-place had faded 
away, while a distant place and another time 
blended into one here and now. He stopped for 
a moment, just a little surprised, it seemed, to 
find himself again in Rome. 

"During all that time," he went on, "I, who 
stand here today and marvel, did not exist. I, 
from far away America, feel very exotic and out 
of place, standing on the sanded floor of the 
Colosseum. To me the wonder of wonders and 
miracle of miracles, is not the Colosseum itself 
but the fact that I am here. 



86 DEKA PARSEC 

"Historians did not prepare me for this poig- 
nant introspection, but my mood is, for me at 
least, a vital part of history and a living part 
of Rome. It was this feeling which prompted 
me to wedge a tiny block of stone into a crevice 
of the wall. I selected a place near the portal of 
a den, where, in the long ago, wild beasts were 
goaded along narrow alleys to the arena. In the 
walls are still the marks of iron bars and gates. 
It was from this point that the lions charged, 
in the frenzy of their hunger, upon the Chris- 
tian martyrs and devoured them in the presence 
of heartless thousands. In my own conceit I 
pondered over the fact that a thousand years 
hence another American may stand in the same 
place; perhaps his eye will fall upon my little 
block of stone, which represents my own re-ar- 
rangement of the Colosseum. Will he know and 
understand? Perhaps not, but I can wish and 
hope that he may. 

"I have placed myself in a category by the 
wedging of that stone. I occupy a place in his- 
tory. Vespasin and Titus built the Colosseum 
in the year A. D. 80 ; the feudal lords despoiled 
the walls in part and built their play castles in 
the arena a thousand years later, and still long 
afterwards, almost another thousand years, I 
wedged my block of stone into a crevice of the 



HELPING TO BUILD ROME 87 

wall and thus learned my most important les- 
son in history. There that block of stone, my 
symbol will remain, for I concealed it well and 
wedged it in with all my might, but where will 
I be during all the coming years? As I ponder 
thus the echoes within the great ruin assure 
me that my httle wedge of stone — the token 
of my passing — will speak just as truly for my 
safety and hapiness in that mysterious future, 
when I no longer live, as it spoke of my blissful 
non-existence a thousand years ago. 

"In the presence of stones thus endowed with 
the power to speak I always listen attentively. 
The talking stones in the great amphitheatre 
ask why it is that theologians, psychologists 
and historians never show any curiosity about 
my pre-natal state. They speculate about the 
future alone. Where were you a thousand 
years ago?' shout the stones of the Colosseum. 
'Do you not know that our tiers have supported 
the weight of a hundred thousand people, and 
that those people, frenzied with the blood-lust, 
gazed down from these heights to the arena 
where gladiators slaughtered each other and 
where wild beasts devoured human beings? 
Where were you during all these stirring times ? 
Were you dead or sleeping? Where, indeed, I 
wonder, had I been so long in safe unconscious- 



88 DEKA PARSEC 

ness? What perils I escaped? What heroic 
battles I might have waged I What cruel, brave 
scenes I missed ! Yet these echoes make me be- 
lieve that when the stone which I moved to a 
new position today, has lain there a thousand 
years, I shall again be as safe and happy as I 
was on the day when hundreds of victims spilled 
their blood upon the floor of the ancient Colos- 
seum. 

"Near a pillar I found a growing acanthus. 
Its leaves are fresh and green today. About it 
there is no air of ostentation. It seems so 
young and diffident; yet in it is the venerable 
pai'ent of the Corinthian capital. Greek slaves 
taught the Romans to carve acanthus leaves on 
their capitals, and so it happens that the stone 
acanthus of art cinimbles with age, while at the 
foot of its o^^^l pillar the great ancestor herself 
is ahve with the chlorophyll of eternal youth. 

'The historians did not prepare me for young 
things among the ruins. Neither did they pre- 
pare me for little children in Rome. They left 
me, by implication, with the impression that all 
people within the ancient walls are old, but 
childhood sings by the decaying walls and youtlT 
shouts with joy from the palace^s and hovels of 
the new city whose very foundations are the 
stones of forgotten temples. I seem to feel that 



HELPING TO BUILD ROME 89 

childhood sang in the same way when Rome 
ruled the world. I am sure that Nature, in that 
long ago, was full of the same impersonal, cos- 
mic love-hate and cruel kindness that mark her 
ways today. She harmonized the songs of little 
children and their rippling laughter with the 
roar of devouring beasts and the clash of bloody 
swords. A thousand years in the future, when 
I am unconscious again, children will sing 
among the same ruins and the Corinthian acan- 
thus will be as young as ever. Only the carved 
leaves on the capital will show the marks of 
time. They will be a little more weathered 
and a little nearer again to the formless stone 
from which the forgotten sculptor raised them. 

"These young things of the future enlist my 
fancy today, but the stone I wedged into the 
wall commands my romantic interest in an 
exclusive and deathless way. I have modified 
the Colosseum; I have taken my place in his- 
tory with Vespasian, Titus and the robber lords 
of the middle ages. I share the vanity of their 
glory and also their helplessness, because when 
the future day comes, the day of which my 
wedged stone in the Colosseum is dreaming, 
neither the ancient emperors, the robber lords, 
the Christian martyrs nor I, will have the power 



90 DEKA PARSEC 

to move even that tiny block of granite, or to 
win from strangers the paltry tribute of a tear. 

"I love to gloat over this little cogitation, this 
futile bid for prolonged consciousness and con- 
trol over exterior things. I have stolen a march 
on the learned historians who never by an in- 
finitesimal word anticipated my precious inter- 
pretation of dead stones in the Flavian Amphi- 
theater. Flies buzz lazily through the archways ; 
the rank acanthus grows by the crumbling col- 
umn; sunshine and showers alternate, and my 
flattering stone hides in the crevice of the wall. 
Whatever my own fate may be, my token shall 
last for countless ages. It is just this inexor- 
able continuance of physical symbols that has 
the power of pre-figuring to me my own fate. 
What of my tragic inability to lift even a finger 
and stir the little stone which I so vainly mis- 
placed as the witness of my passing day ! The 
little stone, the giant amphitheatre and human 
history will all again be far beyond my grasp. 

"Echoes from the granite galleries upbraided 
me an hour ago for my unconsciousness. They 
said that I was dead in that age of steel when 
sacrifices and glorious triumphs hallowed the 
very ground where I stood. Yet I am alive to- 
day, and not all the emperors of mighty Rome, 
hot all the gladiators and heroes who died upon 



HELPING TO BUILD ROME 91 

these sands can summon power enough to move 
one tiny stone. And so, in the precincts of van- 
ished grandeur I catch a new meaning in the 
gift of Hfe. I have more earthly power in one 
hand today than all the hordes of Imperial 
Rome. Some day I also must give up that power 
and join the silent ones; yet I have passed this 
way. I have taken to heart one lesson in his- 
tory. My poor, little stone, wedged in the crev- 
ice of the wall shall speak for me and say: 

" Tor none more than thou are the present and 
the past. 
For none more than thou is immortality.' 

"Thus it comes about that the acanthus and 
the Colosseum have taught me a lesson in his- 
tory; they have made my life more vivid and 
my native shell-shocked sentimentality still 
more sentimental." 



LOVE MURDERS 



It was only a sun-faded newspaper, two years 
old, blown by the wind into a tangle of sage- 
brush on the Sierra Madre trail, but it had a 
strange power over Deka Parsec. Carefully he 
straightened out the crumpled relic, disclosing 
a headline that had once flashed its enigmatic 
legend: "Love Murder." 

"This murder is less than a memory now," 
said Deka, more to himself than to me, as he 
held the paper in his hand ; "all the leading char- 
acters are forgotten and the thousands of read- 
ers, thrice thrilled by the cruel details, are now 
inspired by love-deaths up-to-date." 

"Naturallj^ you wonder at my interest," he 
went on, after reading a few words of the open- 
ing paragraph, "but tragedies like this one are 
daily re-enacted and blazoned forth in narra- 
tives of other human combinations. They in- 
terest and instruct me because they show how 
I differ from the dashing Lotharios of the hour. 
You may remember the circumstances of my 
romance — how when I became conscious again 
after months in the army hospital, and received 

93 



94 DEKA PAESEC 

word of my sweetheart's marriage, the news 
did not disturb me. My love and the beloved 
had become separate entities. I was neither 
disappointed nor angry. But in spite of my 
mental calm, there are times when it seems that 
I should try for health again, and, emulating 
other men, make an effort at least to conjure 
up a manly rage over my own love-grievance. 
My justification equals that of the hero in this 
ancient tragedy. Yet I fear a return to the 
healthy state that this popular story presup- 
poses, with its vigorous self-assertion and rush- 
ing of events to the fearsome climax. I shrink 
from it, even though I Imow that by thus acting 
the part of righteous indignation I would win 
the praise of my peers. When I loved and 
thought like other people, I seemed to under- 
stand why the marriage of a lover's sweetheart 
to another man should change the status of 
love itself, but now I feel that it would be 
the most natural thing for the true lover, 
though disappointed, to rejoice — ^not because he 
wishes to aifect a sort of religious self-efface- 
ment — ^but simply because he loves. Yet normal 
people tell me that this is not a practical kind of 
affection. They declare that love may be lost 
or stolen and that the true lover defends his 
possessions." 



LOVE MURDEES 95 

"Yes," I admitted, "even women like to know 
that their lovers are willing to do battle in de- 
fense of love in jeopardy." 

"I have long observed that phenomenon," said 
Deka, "and I find that possession of the loved 
one is deemed the all-important prerogative of 
love. If the lover is thwarted in that possession 
his love grows more intense, culminating in 
thoughts of death for his sweetheart. If he is 
a man of action, the lethal blow follows soon, 
and the newspapers chronicle another loving 
episode. Thus from the news of the day I learn 
that this is the last, convincing expression of an 
undying affection, and yet, in my shell-shocked 
state I cannot appreciate the token. Once, in 
an ungarded moment, I spoke disparagingly of 
love-daggers and poisons; I even went so far 
as to question the devotion of the dagger's icy 
caress, but my auditors exclaimed in chorus: 
*Did he not kill her?' This I could not deny. 
Intimidated by the concensus of opinion against 
me, I did not again express my doubt. I had 
already advertised my own too obvious eccen- 
tricity." 

"But, Deka," I protested, "newspaper stories 
like this one do not reflect the true opinions of 
the community." 

"Possibly not," he conceded. "We might well 



96 DEKA PARSEC 

agree to call this a special case, but if we do this 
we must admit that the news every day is spe- 
cial and thus see the exception become the rule. 
Moreover, the publishers must assume that the 
motives given are the kind that satisfy the 
readers, because the readers do not protest. 
They buy the news with avidity. The absorp- 
tion of love-murder literature by an enlightened 
public is very significant. For me this is dis- 
concerting, to say the least, and it tells me how 
hopelessly abnormal I am in everything that re- 
lates to the activities of conduct. 

"Now, in this thrilling tale of love and trag- 
edy the writer does not hint at a motive which 
I can understand. Love, of course, is men- 
tioned, but that is the very phase of the story 
that, for me, supplies the paradox. Always the 
same old question arises: Why, if the lover 
really loved, could he not rejoice in the reported 
happiness of his beloved?' The writer here 
seems to assume that the girl's marriage to an- 
other man was the vivid incident that moved 
the lover to play his tragic role. But what has 
marriage to do with love ? Are we to infer that 
marriage must, of necessity be either the cus- 
todian or the thief of love? What if the be- 
loved had taken up the study of geometry or 
relativity instead of devoting her thoughts to a 



LOVE MURDERS 97 

man? Would she also have earned, in that 
event, the prize of sudden death at the hands 
of her lover? Obviously no sentimental or shell- 
shocked person who asks these elementary ques- 
tions, can grasp the meaning of this mystery. 
There must be a nameless something which I 
have lost — an unmeasured force — that fur- 
nishes the inspiration for weddings, divorces, 
moving picture drama and love-murders. This 
nameless something may be discovered some 
day by a wizard of science, and then we shall 
fully understand. In the meantime, however, I 
can only stand and wonder while my un-shell- 
shocked neighbors go on loving people that they 
do not even seem to like, and killing strangers 
whose hearts their own hearts have never 
known, all because they love them so." 

"But, Deka," I interrupted, "it is not clear 
to me why you should have any regrets about 
your status of isolation. All the benefits are on 
your side. The peace of mind should abide 
with you." 

"Yes," he answered, "and so it seems to me 
when I am totally abnormal, but sometimes, 
when the air is heavy with the smoke of forest 
fires, or when all space is charged with a kind of 
electricity that makes me negative, I become 
lonesome and turn instinctively in the direction 



98 DEKA PARSEC 

of my former self. I long for things that are 
commonplace and free from the tendrils of 
dreams; I remember dull, plodding people who 
suggest homes and material interests. At such 
times I almost cherish the ways of men who 
produce food, repair automobiles and fight for 
love. While under the spell of this loneliness 
I reproach myself for the neutrality of my own 
love. 

"If I enter again into the interests and ways 
of my neighbors, I must do so as a worthy mem- 
ber of society, and so I set my imagination at 
work and see myself acting after the manner of 
the people's idoHzed heroes. Would I set forth 
on the quest of my stolen love ? Then I tell my- 
self that in truth no lover ever suffered more, 
and I feel the first stirring of a devastating 
rage. I conjure up the motive power of a nor- 
mal man. I am about to make the start, but 
then comes the hesitation, the moment for 
thought — that unfortunate quality which sepa- 
rates the man of dreams from the man of 
action — and I permit such weak things as half- 
forgotten words to arrest me. These words 
may rise from a sub-conscious ocean ; they may 
come from the ethereal summit of Mt. San 
Gabriel, or they may come to me from the deeps 
of the canon, but they always come at this 



LOVE MURDERS 99 

moment and say: *Love suffereth long, and is 
kind: seeketh not her own/ Thus a foolish 
and shell-shocked sentiment paralyzes the 
healthy fury of a lover scorned. 

"Why should the friendly echoes of my moun- 
tains indulge in quotations from a meditative 
seer at the very moment when I am arming for 
action ? "Envieth not/ they go on, *is not easily 
provoked/ 

"I counterfeit a manly ferocity; stimulating 
my imagination to the uttermost, I see myself, 
knife in hand, preparing for love's perfect ex- 
pression, the murder of my beloved. For a mo- 
ment I actually feel normal and masterful ; with 
consummate skill I imitate the fine frenzy of a 
jilted but self-respecting wretch on the eve of 
revenge. But nothing comes of it. 'How does 
true love behave in such a ghastly dilemmt^?' I 
ask of the mountain air. *Doth not behave it- 
self unseemly' comes the answer out of the 
gathering gloom. 

"All day I tarry thus while flouted love goes 
unavenged. The stars assemble for their vigil. 
How indifferent they seem to my prodigious 
fate! How pure and cold and neutral they are! 
Yet, as I gaze at them, there comes a softening 
in their light and they form themselves into 
words on the scroll of the heavens that say: 



100 DEKA PARSEC 

*Hopeth all things, endureth all things, never 
faileth/ 

"My love exploit, of course, is doomed. It 
might have culminated in a popular tragedy if 
only it could have started. Therefore the perti- 
nent question remains. How may I ever become 
a red-blooded man again, while the mountains 
and stars conspire against me? How may I 
ever learn to use the killing knife, the pistol or 
the cave-man's club? How may I thrill the 
world from the front page of the daily news; 
how at last die for love ? 

"Manifestly, no person living in my domain 
can qualify for such an active career. It is, 
perhaps, enough for me to trust that a few 
sympathetic souls may understand my condition 
and explain to others how high-explosive ren- 
dered me incapable of love's death-dealing en- 
terprise." 



THE POSTMAN 



One evening when the letter carrier on our 
street was off duty he showed me this personal 
note addressed to him by Deka Parsec of Lizard 
Lodge : 

Dear Mr. Postman : 

This letter is written with the hope that I 
may be pardoned for giving my unsolicited 
opinion about letter carriers. As my name will 
doubtless inform you, I am not exactly normal, 
but even so, it may not be unreasonable for me 
to suppose that you are at least willing to re- 
ceive a statement from one person who has been 
shell-shocked out of his pristine normality. My 
observation supports the conviction that well- 
poised, sophisticated people do not hesitate to 
give you their opinions, in season and out. May 
I not hope, therefore, to have my humble say ? 

In the first place, let me state that I love 
letter-carriers. This affection of mine calls for 
expression, but I am only to tell my story in 
part. Ever since I became abnormal I have be- 
lieved in praise for the living; so if at times 

101 



102 DEKA PARSEC 

this letter should seem to partake of flattery, 
just remember that but for my abnormality it 
would not have been written at all; as an un- 
shell-shocked person I would have suppressed 
the nice things I believe in order that you might 
have the mental discipline of guessing them for 
yourself. When normal people give letter car- 
riers, or any other carriers, the benefit of un- 
solicited opinions, the said opinions are seldom 
complimentary. It is the way of normality. 
Praise, when it functions according to the laws 
of good society, manifests itself as a form of 
post-mortem, heaven-kissing coruscation. It is 
intimately associated with the things that 
might have been done and the words that should 
have been spoken. 

Now, I am only a partly-feathered, broken- 
winged cogitator, but my feelings have a wide 
range; they run high and low. I am both an 
aviator and a pearl-diver. I like to roam among 
the stars and then to plunge head-long into the 
oceanic deeps for the gems "of purest ray 
serene." This tendency of mine will explain all 
and bring to you the full realization that what 
I say is only the truth. 

You, as a letter-carrier, are daily watched by 
a lynx-eyed world, and yet daily you pass un- 
seen through the desolation of city streets. In 



THE POSTMAN 103 

the midst of tumult you are really alone. Al- 
though you bear tidings to others, you are 
scarcely seen by the hundreds who receive these 
messages from your hands. You are a great 
burden carrier in the season of gifts, and at 
such times you are buried under the mountains 
of cheering parcels you so faithfully bear to 
their destinations. You are the living perambu- 
lating evidence that it is more blessed to give 
than to receive. You are the tried and trusted 
messenger of Cupid, the official announcer of 
the Stork, and the Angel of Death. You can 
read the look of disappointment as it seeps 
through the brave smile that fain would hide 
it. 

I am not forgetful of your history, Mr. Post- 
man, and the long chain of heroic mortals, all 
down the ages connecting you with the gods 
of old. You are the descendant of Mercury, the 
herald of Jupiter and the Messenger of Heaven. 
When I call you the Angel of Death, I do not 
mean that you bring death, but only the news 
of it. However, you should remember that in 
the days of Mercury, it was, indeed, a part of 
the letter-carrier's duty to conduct the souls 
of the dead "that gibber like bats as they fare 
down the dank ways, past the streams of 
Oceanus, past the gates of the sun and the land 



104 DEKA PARSEC 

of dreams, to the mead of asphodel, in the dark 
realm of Hades where dwell the souls, the phan- 
toms of men out-worn." I only mention this 
lest you forget your fearsome heritage. Has 
not the idea persisted even to this day that let- 
ter-carriers are messengers between worlds? 
You, of course, remember this little verse from 
the heart of a child, one of many verses spring- 
ing from the same old yearning: 

"Wait Mr. Postman, don't hurry so fast, 
Wait Mr. Postman, I've caught you at last; 
I've watched and waited since seven 
To give you this letter for Mother in Heaven." 

Letter-carriers were none the less letter-car- 
riers when they dehvered other things than let> 
ters, such as human heads, for example. We 
do not know the name of the postman who car- 
ried to Hannibal the dread news of his brother's 
death, but the missive came in unmistakable 
language when the carrier hurled the head of 
Hasdrubal over the wall of Hannibal's fortified 
camp. That letter-carrier had an unsafe route, 
and his name should have been preserved for 
the inspiration of his brave followers of today. 
There is a great chasm of years between Hanni- 
bal and President McKinley and many letter- 



THE POSTMAN 105 

carriers did heroic deeds unpraised and unsung 
as the centuries passed, but none could have 
shown greater fidehty than Carrier Rowan who 
carried the message to Garcia in the jungles of 
Cuba. He needed all the courage and resource- 
fulness of the Roman bearing the head of Has- 
drubal through the enemy lines. Elbert Hub- 
bard gives us a definition: 'The hero is the 
man who does the work — who carries the mes- 
sage to Garcia." 

I admire letter-carriers because they do so 
much and escape publicity. The pages of his- 
tory are cluttered up with the stories of eon- 
querers and kings, but seldom is anything re- 
corded about the faithful messengers, the de- 
voted letter-carriers who really won so many 
wars and saved so many lives. One of the proofs 
that civilization has advanced to a measurable 
extent may be found in the fact that letter-car- 
riers in our day may deliver bad news to a 
peevish king and not be slaughtered in their 
tracks. You are in an honorable profession and 
not far removed in time of peace from the physi- 
cal or moral heroisms of the Pony Express 
riders, the romantic letter-carriers of our one- 
time Wild West. You should not forget that 
you belong to that illustrious fraternity. 

You are a merchant of the highest class, for 



106 DEKA PARSEC 

your commodity is nothing less than thought 
itself dressed in symbols. You are the purveyor 
of tahsmans, amulets, philtres, written incan- 
tations and cabahstic inscriptions. This is 
abundantly proven by j^our dehvery of a be- 
wildering assortment of love letters, patent 
medicine philtres and the wild incantations of 
oil stock salesmen. Never did sorcery, magic, 
black art or necromancy, as practiced in the 
caves of the watches, equal the artfulness of let- 
ters setting forth the merits of mid-cat oil. 
Yet these dangerous and magical fulminations 
pass daily through your hands leaving you un- 
haiTticd and unmoved. On the envelopes which 
contain your psychic freight, are strange and 
weird inscriptions that only you are able to 
read. You are a doctor of hieroglyphics, runes, 
cuneifoiTn characters and all the multiform 
hand^TOtings and typewritings known to man. 
Your quahty of clairvoyance, developed by 
constant contact with half -hidden words, goes 
beyond the dreams of the wizards, and it is the 
one which I most admire. It enables you to 
perform, in the most natural and unconscious 
manner, the highest duty of your office — the 
duty of dispensing sympathy and enlightened 
understanding to a distraught world. It is your 
higher nature that tells you how to comport 



THE POSTMAN 107 

yourself on the street and on the doorstep, when 
anxious hearts are waiting for letters which 
they are afraid to receive. In those exalted 
moments you are a kind of priest, receiving con- 
fessions and offering consolation — not, indeed, 
that you do these things in crude actions or 
words, but rather that you exhale a stimulating, 
hopeful atmosphere, giving all men the impres- 
sion that no matter how sad the news may be 
today, you still have it in your power to bring 
good news tomorrow. While the joys and sor- 
rows of others seem all alike to you, in your 
god-like impersonality, we know that you feel 
and sympathize according to a spiritual law, a 
law which permits you to give of yourself and 
yet retain enough strength to deliver all your 
merchandise. 

You are the good friend of widows, orphans, 
pensioners and the great army of the love-lorn. 
They all know your step, the way you carry 
your head and the meaning thereof, the glance 
of your eyes, in fact, the very secrets of your 
soul, because they study you with a deathless 
zeal. They can tell whether you will cross the 
street and forget them today, or whether you 
will turn in on the walk with some vital news. 
They know you far better than you know your- 
self, and yet when you hand them the letter of 



108 DEKA PARSEC 

letters, your poor, perspiring form fades out 
before their eyes. You thus learn over and over 
again what it means to oscillate between every- 
thing and nothing while maintaining the even- 
ness of your temper and the lovableness of your 
nature. You scatter joy and sorrow and con- 
solation on the arid streets every day, and 
*'blush unseen" in the midst of the throng. 

For these reasons, and for many others not 
here written, Mr. Postman, please accept the 
renewed assurances of my highest regai'd. 

Your old friend, 

DEKA PARSEC. 



WALKING 



It was a chance meeting of Alpine Hikers by 
a drinking pool in the canon. Deka Parsec sat 
on a boulder, just beyond the intangible bound- 
ary of the group. The high-tension of his 
nerves always put him where he could not be 
claimed or classified. I wondered how the crowd 
psychology would affect his super-normal mind. 
In his eyes I caught the gleam of a kindliness 
which I knew he must entertain toward all out- 
door devotees, and so, without asking his per- 
mission, I made bold to announce that Deka 
Parsec would speak to us about something that 
had been revealed to him under the heightening 
influence of shell-shock. He gave me one fleet- 
ing look of reproach, but accepted the challenge 
with becoming grace. 

"Ladies, gentlemen and animals," he began, 
as he tossed a pebble into the pool, "creatures 
who love the same thing should love each other. 
Any one who attempts a speech should first as- 
sure himself that patience and love are written 
in the faces of his victims. You love to walk, 
and therefore I am safe within the circle of your 

109 



110 DEKA PARSEC 

forgiveness." Walking i^- a process of the crea- 
tive, emotional type, and hence but little under- 
stood or appreciated by harness-broken business 
men and other disappointed people. Riders live 
wholly outside the domain of this evolution and 
consequently can think of walking only in terms 
of riding. This is like thinking of sugar in 
terms of salt. 

Riders say the walker wastes valuable time, 
because, if he is going anywhere, and is an up- 
to-date man, he should be excited ; he should be 
anxious to arrive. The whole world's work, 
they say, is waiting to be done. But time is not 
valuable to the walker because he is the owner 
of eternity ; he is not going anywhere and there- 
fore cannot be anxious to arrive; the world's 
work has waited a long tim^e, waited for wars 
and everything else to pass, so it may wait a 
little longer. Physical instructors, health- 
farmers, hammer-throwers, weight-lifters, 
wrestlers, golf-players, and athletes in general 
all agree that walking is not real exercise, and 
that it is not intense or endurance-testing in its 
nature. 

Persons who cannot walk declare that the 
walking man is unsocial because he delights in 
walking alone, and that he is unspiritual, with 
his mind always on the dusty road. These peo- 



WALKING 111 

pie are thinking of activity in terms of inertia. 
Their pronouncements are without authority for 
they speak out of a legless experience. 

When the walker contemplates the rider he 
is not conscious of any marked emotion save 
that of pity. This is not, indeed, the pity of a 
patronizing man, proud of his superiority, but 
the compassion of the true walker for a fellow- 
being whose joys must forever function accord- 
ing to the flow of gasoline. Of course the walker 
knows that the rider gets pleasure from his 
rides — as much pleasure, no doubt, as can ever 
come to a creature with undeveloped lower ex- 
tremities and an unrealized higher nature. In- 
cidentally, it should be stated that the walker 
understands relative speeds and values as few 
other men understand them, and so he sees in 
the figure of the motorist an inert mass lan- 
guishing upon ignoble cushions of ease. He 
sees a man moving by proxy; he beholds the 
paradox of a stationary thing in motion, a mov- 
ing mass that moves not. The walker believes 
that the arrested evolution in the legs and mind 
of the motorist is responsible for what may be 
termed the rider's obsession regarding walkers. 
This obsession manifests itself in the rider's 
belief that the walker is going somewhere. All 



112 DEKA PARSEC 

riders think this, even though they themselves 
are seldom going anywhere. 

If a man in a car, going nowhere, as usual, at 
the behest of his own pleasure, should overtake 
a man walking by the command of a like im- 
pulse, and the walker should invite the motorist 
to park his car at the roadside and walk with 
him, the motorist should feel highly compli- 
mented. Such an invitation is not extended to 
everybody. He should accept with the gratitude 
of one called into the privacy of high thoughts. 
Many a gentle walker breaks up a delightful trip 
of his own to please a kind-hearted riding man. 
The walker appreciates the courtesy, but if he 
accepts the ride it is to please the rider and not 
himself. Yet when he invites a rider to walk 
with him his invitation is sarcastically declined 
by the man on the cushion, who at once asks 
the walker to get in and have a free ride to the 
insane asylum. 

On a recent walking trip I had opportunities 
to study car-drivers. A walking man has noth- 
ing on his mind but a few wayward thoughts, 
and so it is easy to count the passing cars and 
to classify them. I found that one in every 
sixty of the high-power cars wanted me to ride, 
while one in every fifteen Fords extended the 
same invitation. All the truck drivers thought 



WALKING 113 

I needed a lift. No black man, Mexican or Jap- 
anese ever went by without asking me to ride. 
From these observations I deduced that as peo- 
ple rise in the financial world and express them- 
selves in cars, they come more and more to 
appreciate the pedestrian's mind, until, among 
millionaires, we may confidently expect to find 
persons so enhghtened on the subject of walking 
that they never ask any one to ride. 

The professional athlete, quite as much as the 
motorist, is an enigma to the walker. Men who 
arrange field sports seldom include walking in 
the program. Possibly this is for the reason 
that they assume everybody can walk, while 
only a few can run one hundred yards in ten 
seconds. Nevertheless the truth is that scarce- 
ly any one can walk, and, among the walking 
failures are some of the hundred-yard runners. 
Walking, as an athletic event can easily assume 
an intensity too great for track racers and even 
pugilists. But, whether the walker is putting 
forth all his strength for the long-endurance 
test, or merely strolling, he expects from the 
motorist and the athlete the same consideration 
these worthy individuals demand for them- 
selves. 

The motorist seems to know intuitively that 
athletes of every class, except the walker, would 



114 DEKA PARSEC 

decline all offers to have their exercises per- 
formed for them by machinery. It would be an 
easy matter to help them, just as easy as pick- 
ing up a pedestrian. A bag-punching machine 
would be a boon to prize fighters training for 
the movies. A caterpillar tractor or a baby- 
tank would do more execution on the football 
field than eleven brave men and true. Yet, in 
spite of these self-evident facts, the only muscle- 
exercising and health-pursuing man who is ever 
offered gasoline power for carrying on his 
chosen work is the walker. He is offered this 
disparaging assistance, and he is expected to 
accept it in grateful humility. If he refuses, it 
is at the peril of his reputation for sanity. 

No person is in position to declare that walk- 
ing is not exercise unless he can walk at least 
fifty miles in one day. No person has a right to 
say that walking can not be made a test of 
physical and mental endurance until he has at 
least equalled Weston's record of ninety-nine 
miles each day for six successive days. On the 
other hand, if there are persons who think walk- 
ing is too laborious, they should know that any 
one, in good health, between the age of ten 
years and the age of eighty years, should be 
able to walk four miles an hour for twelve 
hours. Few indeed, there are who can do it, 



WALKING 115 

and by that measure the walker knows how far 
civihzed humanity falls below the physical nor- 
mal. This may explain why so many pampered 
souls regard the pedestrian as uncivilized. 

The accusation that walkers are unsocial and 
earthy is the most unfair of all. It reveals a 
still more grievous falling below the normal on 
the part of ordinary people, for it is just in 
their social and spiritual evolution that walkers 
approximate the highest of all ideals. He or 
she who walks with a walker must be a real 
companion, a social creature, for walking dis- 
courages make-believe; it invites confidences, 
discovers common interests, prompts naive con- 
fessions, seeks and gives consolation, strength- 
ens the bonds of friendship, and, in fact, 
achieves every worthy purpose of social life. 
In dispensing with sophisticated manners and 
affectation, walkers eliminate discordant ele- 
ments from their society and thus avoid a world 
of trouble. 

All the good places of earth are reserved for 
the people who walk. For them exist the moun- 
tain peaks; for them the dim, cool forest, the 
tangled underbrush, the dells, the crystal 
streams, the floes of the Arctic and the jungles 
of the tropics. Walkers are not going any- 
where, having already arrived; every stopping 



116 DEKA PARSEC 

place is in itself for them a destination; for 
them are the hushed, mysterious nooks, the 
brooding silence, the cloisters of nature, the 
mandragora of meditation and repose ; for them 
also the slippery precipice, the glacier, the dizzy 
heights and the thrills. Wherever they go, on 
the roads, the trails and in the trackless wastes, 
people who walk find all that is good for man 
to find and nothing that is bad. 

The real pedestrian, when he is alone on the 
road, walks straight into celestial reveries. He 
is lifted above petty things and awed by the 
silence of impersonal nature. He has the choice 
of the highway, by-way and mountain trail, ac- 
cording to his mood. Where others see only 
dust and heat he sees the unseen. If, perchance, 
his course leads by the city abattoir and the cab- 
bage patch, he names his path the Road to Man- 
dalay or the beautiful Champs Elysees. He can 
always have what he wants. He meets the 
rising sun in meadows wet with dew and loiters 
enchanted where birds sing praises to the uni- 
verse. At high noon he rests in the shade of 
rock or tree, far from the turmoil of city streets 
and the wheels that men have made. At even- 
ing time a veil is drawn across every distant 
view, half concealing, half revealing pictures 
painted for him alone, because he is the only 



WALKING 117 

one who has time to pause and read their 
meanings. 

In walking there is physical development, 
spiritual evolution, good health, exalted com- 
panionship, meditation and the exact antithesis 
of each and every unlovely thing which our civ- 
iHzation imposes upon us. The man who walks 
has all the time there is. If he is in sorrow he 
has time to walk away from it; time to walk 
until physical weariness wraps him in the blan- 
ket of an infant's slumber where no sorrow is. 
He has time to walk away from the money-mak- 
ing, money-losing treadmill where men lose 
their health and happiness. He has time to 
search for the walker's mood of physical invin- 
cibility and to find it where he finds his second 
wind and second courage. He has time to walk 
away from old age and the croaking crones who 
would force dotage upon him. He has time to 
think, time for a congenial friend, and — wonder- 
ful to relate — he has time for the birds, the 
bugs and the stars." 



THE TOURIST 



We were off duty that day, and on the beaten 
trail of the tourists. "Of course, you know," 
said Deka Parsec, "that the mountains consti- 
tute for me one large theater, on whose ample 
stage my poor friends, the lower animals, play 
their parts. At every favorable point of view 
on the trail there is a reserved seat for me 
where I make myself comfortable and watch the 
performance. Indeed, I am authorized by the 
animals to announce that there are also good 
seats for all persons who care to watch with 
me. These vantage points are open to the eyes 
of every one, but in spite of this many of the 
tourists who succeed in reaching Lizard Lodge, 
complain of the long, dusty trail and the weari- 
ness that assails their tortured flesh. Perhaps 
this weariness explains why the tourists so sel- 
dom understand me when I speak of the come- 
dies and tragedies enacted on this wide stage 
by my versatile and beloved animal friends. I 
have also thought that their failure fully to un- 
derstand and appreciate these humble actors 
may be due in part to the fact that the tourists 

119 



120 DEKA PARSEC 

themselves are so often members of the playing 
company, although they never seem to realize it. 
Being on the stage, they can not see themselves 
as I see them. I, in my shell-shock and nebulous 
world, stand apart where the whole perform- 
ance can be seen. That is why bugs, birds, 
spiders, tourists and lizards all speak for me, 
and then pass on, never knowing that they have 
been near the footlights of the wide-open stage 
at all. 

"It is possible that I may have shown a pref- 
erence for animals over other people when, on 
former occasions, we met in wild places, but the 
truth is that I merely group human beings with 
eagles, rabbits, spiders and all the other mem- 
bers of my somewhat unscientifically classified 
kinfolk. I love them all. Shall I describe a few 
minor performances by way of example ? Well, 
one day a tourist with a very sour face strutted 
across my stage and spoke a few lines about the 
cold, uncommunicative persons he meets on the 
trails. He denounced them for their unsocial 
ways. While he was speaking a chipmunk 
made friendly advances unheeded, and a happy 
lizard, sunning itself on a rock, regarded him 
with a penetrating and brotherly eye. The ani- 
mals considered it a very clever skit. When, at 
last, the sour man disappeared behind the cur- 



THE TOURIST 121 

tain of the mountain, a catbird applauded bois- 
terously. The lizard, the chipmunk and the cat- 
bird, all friends of the man, must have taken 
his complaint as a bit of ironical self-analysis 
well acted and they laughed at him while they 
loved him. 

"It was on the same day, while I was resting 
at a place overlooking Echo Canon, that a lady, 
perspiring profusely, labored up the rocky in- 
cline. The sun was hot and the dust lingered 
lazily in the air close to the ground. The sum- 
mit was the chmber's objective. Resting for a 
moment near me, she discoursed regretfully on 
the subject of the surf, beating, as she said, at 
that very minute on the beach miles away. She 
condemned herself for the folly of attempting a 
mountain ascent when she could just as well 
have been swimming in the stimulating water 
of the ocean. Her dramatic part for that day 
was to register the familiar vow, of, 'Never 
again.' 

"It is remarkable how well the tourists play 
their part in the comedy of the mountains. 
They never rehearse and yet each day a new 
company will play the same role with a tech- 
nique of astonishing precision and uniformity. 
Many times I have met that practical married 
man who left rural blessings in Iowa because 



122 DEKA PARSEC 

his wife yearned for travel. Each time a differ- 
ent actor plays the part, but always the char- 
acter is the same. This familiar martyr walks 
unseeing, his eyes glazed and dull, fixed on va- 
cancy. He portrays, for the edification of my 
animals, how wretched one human being can be 
in the presence of unagricultural grandeur. He 
depicts the bovine spirit struggling under a 
shock very akin to my own, and for this reason 
I can envisage his pictures of far-away corn- 
fields and fattening cattle while his feet do a 
foolish trance-walk from peak to pinnacle in the 
wake of a romantic spouse. 

"Close on the heels of my purblind agricul- 
turist comes the excited lady in the first flush 
of travel. She is ^seeing America first.' Her 
part in the play is a talkative one, but she does 
not speak of the wonders upon which her eyes 
are now resting, for she has just explored the 
Mammoth Cave, the Grand Canon of the Colo- 
rado River, Yellowstone Park, and other stu- 
pendous marvels. She directs her descriptive 
fire against a nice man with a weak heart — too 
weak for mountain trails and the encounters 
thereof. The nice man endeavors, without suc- 
cess, to retaliate by describing his fishing ex- 
ploits in the mosquito-infested lakes of the Can- 
adian north woods. At the Half Way House 



THE TOURIST 123 

these two performers combine their role with 
that of the sophisticated man who, while at din- 
ner in the rustic dining room, grieves very audi- 
bly for the food that can be found only in good 
old New York, which food, by the way, he ex- 
plains to the man with the weak heart, belongs 
by divine right to all well-bred gentlemen every- 
where. This epicurean from Gotham is visibly 
pleased and consoled by the pantomine of the 
head waitress who shows an appreciative eval- 
uation of his gastronomic deprivations, and, by 
the most realistic gestures simulates the draw- 
ing of corks from mythical bottles and the 
sizzHng of effervescent vintages now prohibited 
but not quite forgotten. 

"Group-acting is carried on by personally- 
conducted tourists who take me to task for the 
manifold short-comings of the Sierra Nevada 
Mountains. Now and then there is a touch of 
comedy, much enjoyed by the lizards and chip- 
munks, when a loyal and unshell-shocked human 
defender apologizes for Mother Nature and the 
way she made everything. 

"In one comer of this teeming and squirming 
stage two lovable old ladies are talking. Soon 
after being shell-shocked I noticed that it is only 
the old who have time to talk and think. It may 
be for this same reason that old people come in 



124 DEKA PARSEC 

greater numbers to play their roles with my 
animals in the mountains. The old ladies are 
not complaining about anything. Before them 
and below are the beauties of earth, and over 
their heads the glory of the starry heavens. 
They are happy and apparently obhvious in the 
very possession of treasures for which travelers 
gladly overcome weary miles, and about which 
poets rave and sing. Soft zephyrs fan their 
cheeks and the genial temperature of California 
adds to their sense of aged, justified repose. 
They respond in the form of a cozy chat, ignor- 
ing in the meantime their immediate surround- 
ings. Theirs is a sympathetic interchange of 
youthful reminiscences and a discussion of 
grandchildren in Illinois. 

"Now comes the good and efficient hostess of 
the Half Way House, with her sense of duty 
and a heart full of pity for young people in pain- 
ful need of exterior excitation. She seeks to 
beguile men of all ages into the needless gyra- 
tions of the dance. Up-stage reposes a man busy 
with his own thoughts, while near him a soldier 
of the Civil War revels in heroic memories. 
Upon the two the well-meaning hostess descends 
with the result that the aged man is galvanized 
into his oft-repeated battle of Gettysburg and 
the thoughtful man is changed into a polite lis- 



THE TOURIST 125 

tener. Not for long, however, can this idyllic 
scene endure, for in the very middle of Pickett's 
charge the kind auditor is whisked away and 
the old soldier is left to his meditations once 
more. The whisking away is done by a charm- 
ing young lady who declares that ^Grandpa is in 
his anecdotage/ 

"I am convinced that the human actors seek 
the mountains for purposes obscure. Their os- 
tensible acts are often broken into with surpris- 
ing results ; yet all their deeds seem to harmon- 
ize and to form a part of some great drama to 
be finished elsewhere. Interruptions and ampu- 
tations take place in their speeches but few 
seem to care. Every fragment has a place and 
foolish deeds have their own justification. This 
is illustrated by the man with the short-arc 
mustache, who, while star-gazing with his in- 
tellectual lady-love, kisses her passionately and 
with seeming irrelevance, not to say irrever- 
ence, when she makes a casual remark about 
the double stars near Vega. Again we see con- 
versational amputation when the learned geol- 
ogist, in the midst of an able discussion on the 
land-slip that ages ago cleft Mt. San Gabriel 
loses his layman listener by the accidental ar- 
rival of a prosperous cattleman from Colorado, 
who greets his old friend, the layman, and pro- 



126 DEKA PARSEC 

ceeds to renew mutual memories of the last 
stock show at Denver. 

"Thus for minutes or hours each day I may- 
observe the antics of people. I may laugh at 
them or with them ; I may compare them with 
my constant companions, the animals. Some of 
them have bodies in feverish action with minds 
at rest ; others have bodies at rest and minds in 
action. Some are disappointed because the 
mountains are not responsive and some are at 
odds with their own kind. As for me, when the 
play is over for the day, I return to my lodge, 
where the present moment is all-sufficient and 
where no conflicting interests ever intrude." 



FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 

At Home, Lizard Lodge. 
Dear Friend: 

Although I expect to have you by my side in 
front of the fireplace before many evenings 
have passed, I will say a few words now on the 
subject of houses. I can give you no real archi- 
tectural advice for use in planning your new 
residence , but I can at least warn you that in 
the building you are about to erect you will re- 
veal your innermost soul to all shell-shocked and 
discerning observers. I would invite your atten- 
tion to the following facts : 

It is possible to discover the character of a 
person by interviewing his house. If he is too 
poor to have the house he really wants we will 
find him living in one which expresses his finan- 
cial limitations. If he is rich his house may re- 
veal his financial condition, although not always, 
but it cannot fail to give us the measure of his 
appreciation of the beautiful. His house is the 
face or mask which he presents to the world. 
Not all houses are vivid in their expressiveness, 

127 



128 DEKA PARSEC 

but the same may be said of masks and even liv- 
ing faces. There are houses whose windows 
stare hke the vacant eyes of insanity ; there are 
others with sane and benign expressions ; there 
are houses with cold, cynical glances, which, 
like the House of Usher, give to their surround- 
ings a ghostly and melancholy air. 

All houses are haunted, some with good 
spirits and some with bad. These spirits, of 
course, are the people who live in them. All 
houses have their own noises — ''house sounds" 
— their dwellers call them, such as creaking 
stairs, snapping nails on frosty nights, scurry- 
ing sounds in the garret, furnace rumbhngs in 
the basement, and culinary music in the kitchen. 
There are neglected houses, perched on high, 
broken foundations, under which dogs love to 
congregate with their boy friends. There are 
houses infested with rats, and there are houses 
under whose eaves swallows come every spring 
to build their nests ; there are still other houses 
which are avoided by beasts, boys and birds. 

There are houses built in dreary rows, the 
habitations of the very poor. Little children 
who live in them receive their first impres- 
sions there. These impressions are hideous and 
depressing. They enter into the mind of the 
child and form his basis of comparison, his 



FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 129 

ideals. These black monster houses in rows 
offend against childhood, against art, against 
beauty and against the spirit of good. They 
are the hatcheries of criminals by the sheer 
force of their unloveliness. The men who built 
them sinned against humanity. These terrible, 
haunted houses spring up like dirty mushrooms 
about steel mills, coal mines and coke ovens. 

On the wind-swept plains of the far western 
states are gaunt, cheerless houses, successors of 
the pioneer dugouts and shacks. The pioneers 
built for utility and protection from the unmiti- 
gated heat of summer and the cold of winter 
where there were no trees to shade the earth or 
to break the wind. Their children now build to 
express prosperity but their houses are lifeless 
and destitute of everything ornate and inviting. 
The poverty of their art gives the wayfarer 
pangs of homesickness. His heart cries out for 
the solace of beauty for he sees nothing but an 
arid architecture imitating an arid landscape. 
Not all soulless houses, however, are to be found 
on the vast plains, for on Fifth Avenue in Nev/ 
York City is a marble palace which combines 
Greek and Roman ideals with the ugliness of a 
tar-paper shanty. It starts from its foundation 
immaculate as an Italian villa but finishes in a 



130 DEKA PARSEC 

mansard roof of brown shingles like a glorified 
rabbit hutch. 

Mining millionaries, war profiteers and coke- 
oven magnates are not the only people who 
reveal their hearts in their houses and offend 
against beauty and childhood; there are many 
prosperous communities that build school 
houses and forget beauty. Little children who 
idealize the scene of their instruction are thus 
led astray. Their minds are filled with many 
inconsequential facts and fancies, but the finest 
of all their sentiments — love of beauty — is out- 
raged. 

Not only has humanity the power to express 
itself in houses, but the houses seem to have a 
living, conscious desire to express the people 
they shelter. One man will take brick or wood 
and build a prison house which will tell all the 
world that no love dwells therein. Another 
man will take the same materials, or nothing 
but sod, and build a house in the spirit of Michel 
Angelo. Flowers and vines will seek his walls, 
and his little windows speak convincingly of an 
abundant life within. 

There is something about the way a house 
thrusts its chimney up into the air, the way its 
porch comes out to meet one, or recedes, that 
expresses the spirit of the in-dwelling people. 



FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 131 

There are houses whose windows look out from 
overhanging eaves like sad eyes. There are 
houses around whose corners the wind sweeps 
in bluster and dusty madness, and there are 
other houses where the wind never seems to 
take such liberties. It may rustle the ivy or 
shake down a few leaves from a nearby tree, 
but it does no more. There are houses that do 
not seem to love the trees of their own domain, 
and the trees also seem to understand, for they 
do not allow their branches to caress where no 
love is. Around the eaves of a joyless house the 
wind moans and sobs at night. Lonely prairie 
houses have the faculty of turning the cease- 
less wind into eerie voices that intone a litany 
to the spirit of the plain. 

There are farm houses in old districts where 
the green shutters on the front windows are 
never opened. They stare like blind men's gog- 
gles. In the front room of such a house there 
lingers a musty air reminiscent of the last fun- 
eral or wedding. On the center table is a Bible 
and beside it a glass dome covering gilded cat- 
tails from the meadow swamp. On the walls 
are ancestral pictures of stem, forest-clearing 
men and spinning, butter-making women. Long 
years ago they died. In their pioneer lives of 
hard labor they never awoke to a single claim 



132 DEKA PAESEC 

of beauty. Their children are like them, and 
so the large, two-story house that their prosper- 
ity erected, is awake only in its kitchen. The 
front part of the house broods in cave-like dark- 
ness, and the parlor is a tomb. 

In Washington, D. C, there are many fine, 
large houses built in solid rov/s. Their archi- 
tectural over-lord imposed upon them a heavy 
burden, for, unlike their poor cousins, the New 
York tenements, these pretentions dwellings of 
the Capital yearn for the display of home-like 
individualities, but no opportunity here presents 
itself. For these houses there is no proud 
lifting of a roof above the common level, no 
retreating into protecting shrubbery, no shrink- 
ing from the noisy street. Inexorable fate has 
placed these ambitious houses, like civil service 
employees, on the same foundation. Nothing 
can help them, because they have no room to 
grow, and nothing can throw them down be- 
cause they lean upon each other. Deprived of 
all personality, they are too poor to harbor 
ghosts, and cut off without eaves, there is no 
place for the wind to moan. 

Every house, whose good fortune it is not to 
be immured, smothering in a row, has an atti- 
tude of mind as well as a face. It can give 
the world the cold shoulder by a subtility all its 



FROM CELLAR TO GARRET 133 

own, by the lift of a porch roof or the massive 
immobility of its door. It can incline a little 
toward the approaching guest, receiving him 
with kindness, or it can stand erect, cold and 
aloof. It may even seem to gather its skirts 
about it and retreat into the background, or 
come out boldly in. front, frank and unafraid. 

Men may build houses as they will, combin- 
ing the artistic triumphs or failures of the 
Old World and the New, but each house will in 
the end, express the soul of the occupant or the 
degree of his revolt against outrageous fortune. 
Each house will stand faithful to the attitude 
ordained for it by its maker. It will look its 
moods through every window and voice its 
dweller's emotions, child-like or ghost-like, in 
nuances of familiar house-sounds from cellar to 
garret. 

This then, is shell-shocked architectural in- 
formation. Whatever you do, be sure that your 
designers live up to the spirit of these remarks 
that you may not have your soul presented 
to the world in false forms and colors. 

Your sincere friend, 

DEKA PARSEC. 



CASTE 



For many moons newspapers and magazines 
have been filled with forebodings of evil. Proph- 
ecies of world endings have been many. Numer- 
ous sects flourish and seem to draw inspiration 
from the probability of some dire catastrophe. 
Timorous souls quake in the presence of a new 
order of hfe. Political quacks run about the 
world preaching communism, socialism, soviet- 
ism and anarchy. There is a great unrest, a 
boundless discontent. The thoughtful and the 
thoughtless are all hypnotized by some form of 
"jazz." 

Escaping from the feverish tread-mill one 
Saturday afternoon, I started for the only quiet 
retreat within my reach. Lizard Lodge. I 
joined Deka Parsec at Sierra Madre just as he 
was leaving with his burro train for the up- 
trail. The worries of the world were heavy 
upon my heart, and I wished to consult my 
friend about them, but I decided to wait until 
we had reached our cosy seats by the fire- 
place. Immense white clouds, piled up twenty 
thousand feet high over the mountain crests, 

135 



136 DEKA PARSEC 

claimed our adoration for the last hour of the 
climb. The rays of the setting sun turned the 
summits of the clouds into golden fleece and the 
reflection tinted the mountains for many miles. 

*'A11 this splendor makes me feel and think 
in my favorite symbols of the super-sensuous," 
said Deka. ''Just consider how the universal 
benefit, wetness and life-sustaining virtues from 
everywhere, concentrate and condense in a 
great white cloud. I have often wondered why 
clouds are spoken of as dark, forbidding, 
gloomy, in fact, anything but what they really 
are, inspiring and glorious. To be sure, some 
clouds do look black and lowering, but we know 
that in them is the life of all things that live. 
When I think about this it always seems to me 
that the moisture, the invisible vapor that 
comes to the cloud, is hke the invisible goodness 
that permeates humanity, condensing and be- 
coming invisible in centers of radiation and 
beauty. For thousands of miles the clear air is 
feeding this brilKant cloud, but the invisible sky 
is really the mother of it." 

When Deka Parsec spoke of the universal 
goodness that permeates humanity I realized 
how far I had drifted from his viewpoint since 
our last meeting. Through all his shell-shocked 
confusion he had never lost faith in the innate 



CASTE 137 

goodness of life. It was ever the starting place 
for his eulogies or criticisms, and to it in the 
end he returned consoled. When supper was 
over and we found ourselves before the fire-place 
again, I could not formulate my question exact- 
ly as it came to me in the city. I had wished 
to ask Deka just how soon he thought all human 
affairs would crash in ruin. But such a question 
now, I felt, would imply a lack of sympathy for 
his kindly estimate of human goodness, so par- 
tially adopting his attitude, I began : "Deka, I 
have been worried about the apparent chaos 
in social life, religion and politics all over the 
world, and I would like to know what you think 
about it." 

Deka smiled. "I see you are not wholly in 
harmony with my thoughts," he said gently. 

''No, not quite in harmony, Deka," I admit- 
ted, "the world seems so confused." Then, 
wishing to get his ideas on something specific, 
and to clarify, if possible, my own muddled 
thought, I asked: "What element in this ap- 
parent chaos in human affairs do you consider 
the most nearly fatal to happiness ?" 

"None of them are actually fatal or even 
nearly so," he answered quickly, "but some are 
producing painful symptoms. Perhaps when I 
tell you what I feel you will not think I am very 



138 DEKA PARSEC 

optimistic after all. Some normal people call 
me a pessimist when I state facts. Of course 
they believe that these facts are, after all, only 
my opinions. The statement of a fact can not 
reflect credit or discredit upon any person who 
states the fact; he is only a reporter. Now, 
for example there is one element in this tumult 
that I beheve to be the worst of all, and yet 
it is not so considered by normal people. I refer 
to the fault of snobbery or caste. Here on this 
mountain, beyond the reach of confusing noises, 
I can analyze social status in an impersonal 
way. 

When we were coming up the trail this after- 
noon I said that the clear, blue sky contained 
the water vapor which is the mother of the 
cloud. In the same way humanity contains its 
own innate, invisible goodness. Often this good- 
ness becomes visible as it condenses in social 
organizations. Like the cloud, these organiza- 
tions contain and exhibit the virtue. It comes 
to them from the formless everywhere. When 
they , conceive that they in themselves consti- 
tute the human virtue or goodness ; when they 
even assert that they are the permanent reposi- 
tories of it, their usefulness is at an end. The 
besetting sin of all organizations is that they 
exclude. Exclusiveness means caste and snob- 



CASTE 139 

bery. All churches and organizations live in 
constant peril of sinning in the name of caste. 

"Religious brotherhoods are like great, 
heaped-up clouds, catching the light of heaven 
and reflecting it upon the earth; they are also 
like clouds because they make visible and con- 
dense the vapor of human goodness. If the 
similarity went all the way I could say nothing 
but beautiful things about man-made organiza- 
tions, for then these human groups, like the 
clouds, would make no false pretenses, but would 
gather to themselves all the goodness that ex- 
ists invisibly in the great void and precipitate 
it upon the thirsting world. Unfortunately, 
however, the visible, the splendid in form is 
everywhere taken by man for the real. To the 
spectacular many honors are accorded ; the very 
existence of the invisible is ignored. For this 
reason a certain exclusiveness and caste tend 
to gather about organized centers. On all sides 
I see it developing in our democratic country. 
All organizations begin and end in exclusion. 
If they included all humanity they would be ab- 
sorbed, and like the glorious cloud, disappear 
into nothingness by the very act of raining their 
blessing upon the world. But they do not love 
humanity enough for that; indeed many of 
them feel contempt for the seeming emptiness 



140 DEKA PARSEC 

of the atmosphere out of which they were 
formed and filled. 

"Clubs, pohtical parties, churches and all or- 
ganized entities have a function to perform — 
the function of administration. Whenever 
these administrative centers assert any sover- 
eignty over the spirit or invisible vapor, then 
death begins. So far as the spirit is concerned, 
the dead part of every club is the organized 
part. The Golden Rule can not be organized; 
neither can any organization defend it; the 
spirit of Christianity can not be organized. All 
attempts at it have resulted in caste, exclusive- 
ness, social status, segregation and death of the 
ideal. No organization has the right to call it- 
self the defender of love, for love needs no de- 
fense. No organization may truly say that it 
contains all true patriots, all lovers of human- 
ity, or all the followers of Christ. Even the 
twelve apostles were not organized. Christ did 
not organize anything. Men who lend them- 
selves to organizations should know that they 
can, by so doing, further the interests of noth- 
ing except things external ; they may thus assist 
in matters of administration, but the spirit 
must remain within each individual and be by 
him alone adored. 

"Yet the whole world has been organized and 



CASTE 141 

over-organized. The faith put into the result- 
ing castes and snobberies was worthy of a far 
better fate. In my shell-shocked state it always 
seems that in some strange way all organiza- 
tions lead to a denial of self, a sort of stulti- 
fication. They first cause persons to exclude 
other persons ; then they cause the excluders to 
forget the excluded. Thus a part of humanity 
is cut off and an immoral deed is done. 

When the Great War broke out, not all the 
organizations in the world, including the organi- 
zations called churches, had any power to stop 
it. Men in all these Christian organizations, 
and in all other organizations, killed each other 
by the millions. They took chaplains with them 
to the scene of butchery that they might receive 
assurance in their death throes that they were 
going to a place of brotherhood which all the 
organized intelligence on earth had been unable 
to establish here. This is not an indictment of 
Christianity ; it is an indictment of the organi- 
zation fetish that had mistaken its function and 
killed the spirit. There is more of real human- 
ity in the world now than ever before, but it is 
not organized; it knows no caste or snobbery. 
Suffocating in temples and clubs, it has taken 
to wild places. Perhaps Lizard Lodge is one of 



142 DEKA PARSEC 

the places, but let us not give it a name for 
virtue, lest the spirit take fright and fly away. 

"Humanity is learning to suspect membership 
in exclusive circles, because such membership 
means social position, the building of reputa- 
tions and the making of money. These are the 
pillars of caste. It becomes daily more obvious 
that organizations can never check the growth 
of class consciousness, for all organizations are 
themselves class conscious, and that is the curse 
of the world. What can all these cults do but 
fight each other? Socialism, Bolshevism and 
all the rest, rage and tear each other to pieces, 
giving us over and over again the pitiful spec- 
tacle of organized futility. Do we need any fur- 
ther object lessons to establish conviction that 
nothing but ghastly failure must ever attend 
this naming, tagging, standardizing and segre- 
gating of an ideal? Capacity for snobbery is 
augmented by membership in any group that 
excludes a part of humanity. Not all persons in 
groups are snobs, but they have placed them- 
selves in the way of temptation. They have 
placed themselves in an atmosphere of caste, 
the most heartless, selfish and contemptible of 
human traits. In America the only organiza- 
tion we really need is the United States of 
America itself under its constitution. Under 



CASTE 143 

this we may all exercise political powers. It is 
the one, great administrative club and it leaves 
each man the sole custodian of his own ideals." 
*Thank you, Deka," I said, "that disposes of 
a club I proposed to organize for the purpose 
of opposing some other club recently created to 
lobby a new uplift law into the statute books. 
I'll just leave my projected club in its formless 
and harmless state." Then we turned in for 
the night. 



SUICIDE 



The splendor of sunrise from Lizard Lodge 
surpasses all words of description. I stood with 
Deka Parsec under a majestic tree and watched 
the miracle of the east. The first airs of the 
morning stirred the leaves ; Deka's animals, far 
and wide, awoke to the new activities of another 
day. The mountain tops caught the yellow rays 
of the sun and turned their lofty snow-fields 
into gold. 

"Just think," said Deka, "somewhere in the 
lowlands yesterday a hopeless wretch took his 
own life. He turned his back on all this beauty ; 
he turned away without ever having seen the 
marvels that abide in nature's simplicity.'' 

The breeze freshened with the growing light ; 
a bird darted out of the branches over our 
heads, and, rising straight into the sky, sang a 
song of praise and joy. Creeping things rustled 
the twigs at our feet. The dew on Deka's spider 
webs delineated in rainbow hues every figure of 
their matchless engineering. On all sides every- 
thing was alive in perfection. 

145 



146 DEKA PARSEC 

"Yes," Deka continued, "the man who kills 
himself takes a journey away from the main 
range of hills ; he dies in an interval, and a very 
short one. Had he gone but a little farther he 
would have reached a bend in the trail, or, had 
he only waited, a fellow traveler would have 
come to show him the way. There is a tide in 
the mind, like the tide in the sea, that seems 
to ebb and flow. A sorrow that was intolerable 
yesterday is easy to bear today although the 
cause of it remains. It may become intolerable 
again tomorrow, but never can it be fatal to the 
person who waits for the turn in his own men- 
tal tide. The suicide mistakes the moment of 
the turn for the end of all things. Even love 
has its ebb and flow. The love-lorn victim who 
dies between extreme high-tide and the lowest 
of the low, dies foolishly. He dies because he 
cannot believe that the waters will ever return, 
but they always do return for the man who has 
time to wait. It seems to me now, since I 
reached this super-normal state, that all prac- 
tical, sensible people are potential suicides be- 
cause they are so specific in their ambitions. 
They doom themselves to the poignant suffering 
of definite disappointments. I live in a state of 
uniform optimism which normal people call 
shell-shock. They do not understand how I can 



SUICIDE 147 

live without materialistic aims ; but the lack of 
such aims is what keeps me alive. I am never 
disappointed in love, or in anything else. I 
believe that the next bend in the trail will offer 
a new and charming view. The so-called prac- 
tical unpoetic man is, after all, the greatest 
of all illusion builders, for when all his props 
and stays are at last seen to be nothing but 
broken reeds, his whole creation collapses, and 
then it is only the fear of death that saves 
him from suicide. 

"There was a time when I dreamed of great 
achievements. My objectives were perilously 
definite. I admired people who went out and 
got things. I loved the doers and pitied the 
thinkers. But now I am disillusioned. I see 
that all deaths by suicide take place when the 
busy hands are idle — as all hands at times must 
be — and the man himself is thrown back into 
the horrible vacuum of his own mind. Dedi- 
cated to suicide, he perishes in that awkward 
interval, because, being perhaps, an efficiency 
expert, or a winner of definite and material re- 
sults, or a seeker after health where it can not 
be found, or a suitor in the grip of passion, mis- 
named 'love,' he suddenly finds himself in a 
very great hurry with nothing definite to do. 
The affairs of his life are at their extreme low 



148 DEKA PARSEC 

ebb, the time of the turn, the zero hour, but 
it never occurs to him that he should do simply 
nothing when there is simply nothing to do. 
While all things about him hesitate and tremble 
in the balance, he feels constrained to act. By 
his own hand he dies, true at least, to the prin- 
ciple that there must be something doing every 
minute. Therefore, to all persons contemplat- 
ing suicide I would say: Never kill yourself 
today if you can possibly put off the deed until 
tomorrow, for in the meantime you will receive 
good news. 

"Here in wild nature around Lizard Lodge, 
illness and death are concealed and ignored. My 
beloved animals, living so near the Infinite, are 
full of gladness. They are gay in spite of the 
fact that in their world the chase goes on. They 
are undefended, and some of them meet violent 
deaths, but cries of anguish are seldom heard; 
life with them is everywhere in the ascendency. 
The dominant note can always be found in the 
music of running water and in the songs of 
birds. In every part of this vast domain life is 
celebrated, while death is private. Even among 
human beings, caught in the meshes of artifici- 
ality, it is natural to conceal suffering. Only 
the suicide, by his last act, betrays the secret 
that his pain was more than he could bear. 



SUICIDE 149 

What wisdom he might have gained from his 
poor friends, the animals ! 

"The suicide celebrates death, but he is not a 
coward. I am inclined to think that the charge 
of cowardice so often made against suicides is 
really actuated by envy. Persons who would 
gladly go the same road, if they had the physi- 
cal courage, make a virtue of enduring that 
from which they fear to escape. They condemn 
the wayfarer who, though foolish in that in- 
terval of utter discouragement, nevertheless 
had the courage to set forth on a grewsome 
voyage to a dark and unknown country. They 
who condemn the lonely traveler say that he 
was afraid to live. I do not believe this is true. 
People who contemplate suicide merely do not 
wish to live ; they believe they have exhausted 
the possibilities of life, when, as a matter of 
fact, they have exhausted only the possibilities 
of their own conception of life. They have 
denied themselves a view from Lizard Lodge. 

"You may remember the man I saved on the 
cliff — the man who was about to depart this 
world with the belief that spiders have six legs. 
On the way to the lodge that day I asked him a 
few simple questions and made the interesting 
discovery that he knew nothing about all that 
part of the universe which lies outside of a 



150 DEKA PARSEC 

stock-broker's office. He muttered something 
about ruin and disaster. When I pressed him 
for particulars he admitted that he had lost 
nothing but money and the affections of a wom- 
an attached to the money. For these things he 
had attempted to end his life. I then explained 
how futile it was for him to commit suicide un- 
der any circumstances because he was already 
dead to everything worth while. I told him that 
the only black spot in his sunshine was his own 
shadow as he wandered among my pretty ani- 
mals. This compliment seemed to turn his 
thought in the direction of natural things. For 
a time he followed the chipmunks and birds into 
the cosmos where he quickly learned that he 
himself was merely a symbol for zero. And for 
zero, he said, even he could not commit suicide. 
After that he made a mathematical discovery. 
He divided the unity of the universe by the zero 
of his own merits and got infinity for his re- 
sult. The world was at his feet. It was the 
first time in his busy, financial Hfe that he had 
ever accomplished anything. He went back to 
his office, but he has since informed me that 
although he had crawled into the old commer- 
cial sarcophagus — as I once dubbed his office — 
he always keeps on his desk a paper weight 



SUICIDE 151 

cast in the form of a chipmunk-rampant — lest 
he forget. 

"When a person plans suicide he turns from 
the artificial world, which he believes to be the 
whole of existence, and retreats into a psychic 
cavern, deep within himself. Among other in- 
struments of torture, he takes with him two 
terrible words — 'unloved' and 'unforgiven.' 
Could he but come to Lizard Lodge and view 
one sunrise, he would know that he is both 
loved and forgiven — loved for what he is, for 
what he is not, and for what he is to be — for- 
given for the wrongs of all his yesterdays. 
Breathing here the perfume of early morning 
in all its purity, he could not deem himself a 
wretch. Even remorse, the phantom of his 
diseased conscience, would vanish away. How- 
ever contrite his spirit might be, it could not 
condemn him to death for crimes which Nature, 
by her lavish display of beauty, would tell him 
he had not the capacity to commit. Pondering 
over the simplicity and innocence of natural 
things, he would at once detect the overween- 
ing egotism lurking in his old behef that he 
could escape being loved, however, great his 
un worthiness, or be by anyone considered so 
superlatively wicked as to merit unforgiveness. 



152 DEKA PARSEC 

He would classify himself with my mountain 
moths and kindred ephemera who would show 
him how wanton is the folly of any one who 
takes his own life or the life of any other 
creature that, like him, even now flutters its 
last few hours in the sun." 



THE GRAB BAG VISION 



"What a strange stream it is that flows in 
one direction along one of its shores and in the 
opposite direction along the other." Thinking 
thus, I tried to make headway in the seething 
crowd of a city street. Taking refuge for a 
moment in the lee of a lamp-post, I gazed at the 
river of human faces and wondered what the 
hidden impulses could be that drove them in the 
direction of their mysterious harbors. As I 
gazed and wondered, a familiar form came out 
of the river to my shore and stood beside me. 
It was Deka Parsec. 

"Why, Deka," I exclaimed, "you in the city 
— and before noon ?" 

"Yes," he admitted, with a bored expression, 
"let us find that Httle restaurant on the side 
street. I would apologize for being in the city, 
and explain." 

Back once more at our little table in the quiet 
corner, we settled ourselves for the explanation 

153 



154 DEKA PARSEC 

and for the satisfaction of the unhurried mood 
Deka Parsec loves so well. 

"I am here in the city," he began, "because I 
attended a Chamber of Commerce banquet last 
night, and it was too late after the festivities 
for me to go home." 

I looked at him in surprise. 

"Perhaps you expect another apology for this 
explanation," he continued, with a whimsical 
smile, "and I have it ready. I attended the ban- 
quet to please a friend, but I was not really 
present after all, because a vision of an enor- 
mous grab-bag and a god took me away. Per- 
haps if I tell you about this vision you will 
pardon me in full." 

"Judgment shall be suspended until you have 
presented your facts," I replied. 

"Thank you," he said, counterfeiting an ex- 
pression of deep gratitude. "I have been in- 
veigled into banquets before, and so was not sur- 
prised at the effects of this one. Nearly all ban- 
quets commit the folly of fostering oratory. 
This results in great human suffering. Always 
my heart is wrung in sympathy for some poor 
wretch on the program for a speech. Speak he 
must, whether he happens to be fitted out with 



THE GRAB BAG VISION 155 

an idea or not. But there are professional speak- 
ers whose flow of words never ceases. They 
are the men who make me suffer; whenever 
they commence to speak I drift away into ahen 
visions to escape punishment. They tell about 
the good soil, the bountiful crops, the increas- 
ing population ; they deal in quantity and more 
quantity. The speaker of the evening may come 
from a city or village where a renowned scien- 
tist lives and labors ; his community may be the 
home of a brilliant preacher who has power to 
lead his flock into the uplands of exalted 
thoughts ; a serene and happy soul may be liv- 
ing there, loved by the children and the knowing 
animals, but if our club or banquet speaker is 
alive to the demands of such occasions, he will 
ignore every subject not steeped in obvious 
materialism. After a few light remarks, made 
to dull the edge of diffidence, he strides into the 
midst of money, or money's worth, and stays 
there for the evening. An appropriate name 
for these solemn functions would be The Ban- 
quets of the Moles,' for the speaker is always 
a mole of the earth earthy. He goes down into 
the soil, into concrete and visible things." 

"Picture to yourself the situation as it de- 
veloped last night. See me as I follow the 
speaker, counting bushels of potatoes, measur- 



156 DEKA PARSEC 

ing lumber, gloating over cleaming-house rec- 
ords, weighing hogs. He waxes eloquent on all 
things easy to understand; he expounds the 
obvious ; he appeals to the primordial, the prim- 
itive. No wonder then that I gravitate with 
him to the bottom and then escape from him 
altogether by a subterranean route of my own. 
His stringing of words, his intonations and 
simple modes of thought have their effect. Re- 
leased from the labor of analysis, I slip away 
into the long ago, into primeval earth with its 
atmosphere hot and heavy in tropical heat from 
pole to pole. I find myself in some vast swamp 
of the carboniferous age. Wandering among 
tree ferns I inhale the fetid air that rises from 
dense and decaying vegetation ; the thread that 
bound me to the banquet has snapped. Now a 
god-like creature, born of the pensive and pre- 
historic air, takes possession of my senses and 
proceeds to tell me about the one huge grab-bag 
of the world. He seems to be stealing infer- 
ences, but not ideas, from the orator of the 
banquet, whose voice by this time sounds very 
small and far away, tinkling like a bell on the 
borderland of consciousness." 

" *Let us get out of this carboniferous ooze,' 
suggests the god. 'You must get your feet 
upon the solid ground of the Stone Age if you 



THE GRAB BAG VISION 157 

would know something about the grab-bag as 
a social institution. The savages of that remote 
day knew it well, but they did not know that its 
dimensions were the dimensions of the world. 
The web and woof of this miraculous bag are 
the web and woof of the human tapestry. In- 
deed, men have thought in times past that play- 
ful or malevolent gods took the human fabric, 
wrought their designs upon it, and then fash- 
ioned therefrom the grab-bag of life. The 
whole physical earth was thrown into it, but 
men were left to create for themselves all the 
really precious things that lay concealed in the 
deep folds of the potential. Only material ob- 
jects were in sight. The first grab-bag festival 
on earth was attended wholly by cannibals, ar- 
rayed in the garb of nature.' 

"The god pauses here, but his words work 
upon my fancies and lead me into the presence 
of a cannibal feast. I hear men tearing flesh 
from human bones, and see and feel them as 
they jostle each other and struggle for the 
things they call good." 

' They put nothing into the bag but their 
hands,' my godly mentor is saying, 'and when 
they take their hands out they grasp nothing 
but the raw materials of the untamed earth, or 



158 DEKA PARSEC 

perchance the uncooked bodies of their breth- 
ern.' 

"The words 'raw materials' sound so familiar, 
and they are uttered with such earth-like simili- 
tude that they do not seem to come from the 
god at all. They belong to the jargon of com- 
merce and they seem to have the power to dis- 
solve all god-like fancies. I feel sure that these 
dangerous words are coming straight from the 
banquet speaker and are threatening to break 
down the barricade of my revery and invade the 
sacred precincts within. 

"*Ah!' exclaims the god, *I almost let you 
slip away. Cannibal feasts and words from 
without have no uncertain power. But let us 
not scorn the poor savage, for at some place in 
the lost history of the race a human mind 
evolved the stone axe and threw it into the 
world's grab-bag.' 

"As words, thoughts and things are all alive 
in the realms of my banquet reveries, I actually 
hear the great stone axe striking something 
hard, like a mountain of granite in the world's 
grab-bag. Then dishes — incongruous and im- 
possible things — rattle and break. I am dimly 
conscious that an orator somewhere in the uni- 
verse, has punctuated a climax by striking a 
table one resounding blow. The dishes have 



THE GRAB BAG VISION 159 

responded. I find myself half-way back to earth 
again, but realizing my peril in time, I turn 
away and overtake my god once more. 

" That stone axe,* he continues, 'was the first 
donation of man to man. It named an epoch in 
history. Fashioned from the material things 
of the universal grab-bag, it became a kind of 
creature endowed with the mind of primeval 
man. Man made the axe and then, in turn, the 
axe made man. It started savgery on the long 
march toward civilization. An idea working its 
will upon a stone made an axe, and thus un- 
taught creatures became revelations unto them- 
selves. They learned that by invention, they 
could put more into the mystic bag than they 
could take out. This discovery marked the 
greatest event in the history of man.' 

"I hear a noisy confusion of voices, rising and 
falling in waves of applause. A being some- 
where by a table has made an oratorical hit, 
but whether he is a cannibal or a civilized en- 
thusiast I am too deep in shell-shocked detach- 
ment to know. Then out of the babel comes 
a sweet voice, and I am with the god of the 
super-sensuous again. 

" 'Bear with me just a httle longer,' he is 
saying, T know full well that the noises here are 
confusing and the strident calls distracting. 



160 DEKA PARSEC 

Tarry with me but a moment longer in the 
Stone Age and despise not the poor savages. In 
fancy I see them preparing a heritage lor you. 
I see generation after generation of human be- 
ings, clutching with the tiny fingers of infancy ; 
grasping with the firm hold of maturity, or 
fumbling with the tremors of age, always 
taking wonders out of the grab-bag of life and 
putting other wonders in. Down through the 
ages men have labored and added to the treas- 
ure, until now this huge bag contains countless 
worlds, where the gods at first put in but one. 
It contains that which is matter, and all that is 
made of matter. It contains all that is mind and 
all that mind has made of mind. You are at 
once the heir and the creator of many worlds, 
and the one gigantic grab-bag contains them 
all.' 

"Now comes a silence that embarrasses and 
perplexes. I wonder whether my god has for- 
gotten his speech; I squirm in a misery very 
earth-like as I see him looking down at me 
through a purple mist. 

" *I was only considering,' said he, *how best 
to show that the grab-bag of humanity really 
expanded from a thing finite when it received 
its first bit of mind and spirit from the human 
donor. To the whole universe you may give 



THE GRAB BAG VISION 161 

and from it you may receive. It is for you to 
decide whether you will contribute things of the 
mind and heart or only things of matter. Your 
noble civilization is based wholly upon the treas- 
ures wrought from infinite potentialities, and 
not from mere physical contents, as the gods 
first put them into the grab-bag. And so you 
must add to it intelligently and spiritually, lest- 
your civilization disintegrate and leave you at 
last in possession of nothing but the original 
grab-bag of the Stone Age, with its inert matter 
untouched by the magic of mind. I admonish 
you ' 

"Here a loud and raucous voice disrupts my 
whole fantasy. My gentle god is gone beyond 
recall. I am wide awake and cross. The orator 
of the banquet, rising to his supreme climax, 
is saying: 

" In conclusion, I invite you, one and all, to 
come down to Plainfield, and there behold the 
largest crop of potatoes that ever came out of 
the ground.' " 

Deka finished his tale and looked at me across 
the little table. 

"You have not sinned too much, Deka Par- 
sec," I said, "and your apology is accepted." 

"I knew you would understand," he mur- 
mured. 



THOUGHTS 



Deka Parsec has made a true home of Lizard 
Lodge, not a hermitage. It is the place where 
he rests, sleeps and prepares food for his body 
and mind. It has pleased him to simplify his 
worldly affairs and thereby to win industrial 
freedom. In that freedom he finds the joy of 
life. Thus he gains time for that meditation 
which every person needs. At Lizard Lodge, 
far from the noise and jargon of the market 
place, he has the cherished opportunity to ar- 
range the material of his thoughts. He visits 
the centers of human gregariousness and for 
the time being enters into sympathy with their 
activities and interests, but when the time 
comes for him to use his reasoning faculties he 
retires to Lizard Lodge where all conditions are 
conducive to thought. He wishes for all human- 
ity a like boon. He hopes that the time may 
come when all people can find time for thought 
and substitute a httle of it for their present 
round of work and sleep. But he also believes 
that many persons condemn themselves to this 
slavery. "It is their thought," he said one even- 

163 



164 DEKA PARSEC 

ing by the same old fireplace, "their thought 
and not their physical environment, that is im- 
portant. Their thought, in fact, will determine 
their surroundings, just as mine has deter- 
mined Lizard Lodge." 

"But, do you think," I asked, "that the great 
mass of normal, or as you would say, un-shell- 
shocked humanity, is in need of thought for the 
purpose of alleviating its suffering ?" 

"Oh, yes," Deka answered very earnestly, "it 
is just the one thing needful. We are all in 
the same boat, whether we happen to be Tolly- 
anna optimists, Schopenhauer pessimists, or 
bovine dolts who never think at all. There 
comes a time in the life of everyone when ob- 
jective things like the activities of the annual 
vacation begin to lose their charm. The hunter 
misses the joy of the chase; the angler forsakes 
his stream, and even the rambler, that senti- 
mental and complacent idler, discovers a yawn- 
ing hiatus in the midst of his world of wayside 
wonders. This phenomenon of aversion is the 
signal for us to enter upon a new quest, whether 
we are shell-shocked or normal. It is the time 
when we should begin to stalk our own 
thoughts, as once we stalked wild game. It is 
the time when we would endeavor diligently to 
catch baffling ideas and to plan our first ramble 



THOUGHTS 165 

through mental countrysides, as once we 
rambled in the world of visible things. We 
should commence these delightful incursions, 
these trips into the psychological, while we are 
still young, not only for the pleasure they give 
in themselves but because they have the power 
to overcome the opiate of tedium and to restore 
to outward things all their youthful charm. 

"In hunting and angling for thoughts all men 
are free and equal. There are no limitations 
of time or place. We are not compelled to at- 
tend a university. We may travel far afield in 
the realm of mind without even taking a vaca- 
tion. As soon as we begin this new series of 
self -entertainment we are little children again, 
experimenting in a world of wonders. We have 
so many questions to ask and there are so few 
sportsmen here who have penetrated the 
thickets before us. What is the absolute sea- 
level of our convictions about everything? 
What do we actually think about religion when 
we are not bribed or afraid ; what about politics 
under the same circumstances? Lying in am- 
bush for the beings that live in our own minds, 
we may capture one of them and satisfy our- 
selves on the subject of its parentage. We may 
learn whether it is our own or an adopted idea. 
While in these revery incursions what do we 



166 DEKA PARSEC 

really desire? What sentiment, what emotion, 
what thought, above all others would put the 
greatest meaning into our lives? What would 
this meaning be for us alone, without regard 
to our neighbors' normal or religious codes or 
the cherished customs of our own country. Do 
these thoughts of ours look like the thoughts of 
good citizens or outlaws? Are they meek or 
proud? We may discover the very soul of our 
wishes and the nature of our own hearts in 
these moments of unaffected honesty. What 
would we do ; where would we go ; whom would 
we love and where would we dwell, if all money 
limitations could be overcome and all our plausi- 
ble excuses were swept away, leaving us face 
to face with our very selves ? 

"When beauty begins to fade ; when strength 
begins to go; when youth bids us its tragic 
adieu; when dear friends leave for other lands 
or other worlds, and the specter of lonelltiess 
looms very near, what then of our thoughts? 
Are they worth anything? Are they worth ob- 
serving? When we have gone this far we may 
well suspect that the stalking and snaring of 
our own thoughts is really more than a pleasant 
form of entertainment. As we marshal these 
beings of the inner life — the ones that are God- 
like and the ones that are child-like^ — and pass 



THOUGHTS 167 

them in review before us, we see all that tears 
and laughter are made of. We wonder why 
they abide with us so long; why they love and 
hate us with such constancy and with such per- 
sonal selection. 

"These creatures of our mental incursions 
may thus afford us interests and compensations 
unknown to the old world of tangible things. 
A self-reveahng thought is far more precious 
than all the trophies of the chase and the golden 
prizes of commerce. After we have laid a few 
of these careful ambuscades for our own 
thoughts we may begin with assurance to play 
the fortune-teller. We may draw our own horo- 
scopes, for as we think so we are, and so shall 
we receive. Even the Magi could tell us no 
more." 

"You may be right, Deka" I said, "but I am 
sure that not all the oratory that shell-shocked 
nerves could inspire would ever convince any 
one that he possessed a thought worth more to 
him than the golden prizes of commerce." 

"Yes," Deka conceded readily enough, "but 
by that very token man is a slave. He who has 
been endowed by nature with a financially- 
focused mind, has a few disappointing adven- 
tures awaiting him if he tarries until his young 
body grows too old for sports and his mind too 



168 DEKA PARSEC 

centered on gold, before making the first trip 
into realms purely intellectual. I can predict 
for him a disillusionment fraught with bitter- 
ness, if at that late day he should seek to 
escape from the dullness and sadness of the 
outer world by retreating into the jungle of his 
own mind. Yet we know that excursions into 
the objective world will be denied him then, be- 
cause of his physical disabilities, and so in 
fancy, we see him setting out on his first hunt 
for psychic lions. He must penetrate thickets 
and tangled underbrush in all directions. He 
is astonished at the weird flora and fauna in 
what he had always believed to be his own ultra- 
practical mind. All the creatures around him 
are dwarfs and runts, except the one enormous, 
overfed thought of his career, and it is busy 
trampling the others underfoot. Weak and 
emaciated thoughts on all sides engage his at- 
tention. They are not without beauty even in 
their sad neglect. He is moved to pity. He 
asks himself why he turned them away in years 
past — these thoughts of art, of nature, of love, 
even though they had been destitute of money 
value and money power. To be sure he tells his 
conscience now, they did intrude like pratthng 
children, while he was busy with practical 
things. He had called them all useless then, 



THOUGHTS 169 

anaemic, unworthy, weak and contemptible. But 
now, that he has time to consider sentimental 
thoughts, and alas! cannot escape them, he is 
distressed. For the first time he examines 
them with close attention; they look so little 
and mean — these discarded thoughts ot his — 
so puny and so sick, as they languish there in 
the rank jungle of his mind. Then he catches 
a glimpse of the charm that once was theirs in 
full flower, and might still be theirs had he now 
only the power to give them health again — and 
so he is moved to remorse. 

"In their present state he does not find these 
thoughts entertaining; he does not find them 
congenial. They anger him even while they 
arouse his pity. But suddenly he realizes that 
they have been ordained by his own neglect to 
be the only companions of his old age, now that 
he has been driven back upon himself by his 
physical exhaustion — and he is moved to fear. 
In his terror he sees them as they really are, 
his own poor, despised, starving thoughts, the 
waifs of his mind, his stunted, wizened thoughts 
of beauty and love. In company with these 
wretches he must end his days on earth, and 
with them for his ragtag retinue, set out at last 
on a voyage, in obedience to that 'knell which 
summons him to Heaven or to Hell.' " 



THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 



"I have just finished reading sixty or more 
magazines," said Deka Parsec, when I met him 
quite by chance at the city Hbrary. "Yes, he 
continued, assuming that my silence indicated a 
desire for more information, *'I have been check- 
ing up the prophets and ideahsts. You see, the 
thought came to me one night up at the lodge 
that between the year A. D. 1886 and the year 
1897, a certain fifty thousand children were 
born in the United States and doomed by a 
German ideal to die in battle on foreign soil. 
I selected the year 1897 for my magazine in- 
vestigations because by that year the doomed 
fifty thousand were all here; the ideal, the au- 
thor of their doom, was goose-walking in Ger- 
many, and our own counter-ideals were develop- 
ing. It seemed to me that if any prophets or 
ideahsts lived in America that was the year of 
their boundless opportunities. I wished to know 
whether they had made themselves known. 
What did they say when the list of doomed 
children was complete and time had ordered 
them to fall into the ranks already marching in 

171 



172 DEKA PARSEC 

the direction of inevitable and inexorable 
slaughter? 

"I did not read all the books published in that 
year, and so might have missed a prophet or 
two, but it seemed reasonable to me that if the 
magazines are good for anything they must 
grant a little space to the seers. I found no 
space so used. No one even hinted at the ter- 
rible things ahead. I found a few idealists and 
a false prophet here and there — nothing more. 

"Turning to one of our leading magazines, I 
find that the French army is deteriorating 
'through lack of discipline.' And this only 
eighteen years before Verdun with its immortal 
heroism ! 

"The German military establishment is men- 
tioned. Reference is made to the fact that the 
army burdens the German people, but nothing 
is said about its menace to the world. 

"Mark Twain wrote an article entitled *Stir- 
ring Times in Austria.' He may have had a 
presentiment about the things in store for Aus- 
tria, for in concluding he uses these words: 
*Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention 
and did what was claimed for it — got the gov- 
ernment out of the frying-pan.' Mark Twain 
leaves us to our own conjectures about the fire. 



THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 173 

"At another place in 1897 I read : It is not 
with Russia that Germany will ever quarrel. 
These two have had a long practice in settling 
their differences at the expense of neighbors; 
and it may prove next to impossible to oppose 
a combination which in all probability holds in 
reserve offers capable of satisfying the griev- 
ances of France/ In spite of this prophecy, the 
Germans and Russians, only seventeen years 
later, killed each other quite merrily, by the 
millions, while France accumulated a devastat- 
ing array of new grievances. 

"Another wise man in the realm of the public 
prints discusses the mutual jealousies of Eu- 
rope, and then concludes with this pious 
thought : *In our time it looks very much as if 
it is the envy of the many which will have to be 
righteously restrained by the wisdom of those 
in exalted positions.' What became of the 'wis- 
dom of those in exalted positions' when the 
world trembled on the brink of the Great War? 

"Another glowing story is 'Awakened Rus- 
sia.' It contains pictures of many notable peo- 
ple, nearly all of whom have since been mur- 
dered by the Bolsheviki. The learned essayist 
sums up as follows: This then, is the story 
that M. Witte designed the new Nijni-Novgorod 
Fair to tell. It is the story of the present con- 



174 DEKA PARSEC 

dition and recent progress of Russia, and it is 
not a tale of which the minister or his country- 
men need to be ashamed.' Here I paused and 
cogitated over the things the prophet did not 
reveal. 

"Still another wise man of 1897 gives out this 
bit of light : 'It is evident that the most excit- 
ing interests in the Old World in the twentieth 
century are to be the partition of Africa among 
the commercial nations of Europe and the des- 
tiny of China.' This prophet leaves out the 
Great War when making a list of the 'most 
exciting interests' for our century. 

"Here are a few of the typical subjects that 
occupied the pens of the seers and the minds 
of the people in 1897, while Germany continued 
to goose- walk and Europe prepared for our fifty 
thousand graves: 'Has the Senate Degen- 
erated?' 'American Excavations in Greece,' 
'Scientific Kite Flying,' 'Dangers and Benefits 
of the Bicycle,' and 'Stopping Runaway Horses 
in New York City.' 

"In one of our own magazines I found this 
portrait of Emperor William II: 'The picture 
that William. II presents is that of a Prince 
quite by himself; but it is an engaging and at- 
tractive picture none the less. Of one thing we 
may be quite sure : viz., that should the time of 



THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 175 

danger ever arrive for the German Empire dur- 
ing his reign, that empire will have at its head 
a man in the best sense of the word — a man 
who knows what he wants; resolute and Ger- 
man to the core ; fit to cope with troublous times 
and to steer the ship of state with a sure hand. 
And the German nation v/ill obey him with full 
confidence and trust.' This is indeed, a portrait, 
framed and gilded in prophecy, but the prophecy 
is true only in one item — Emperor William II 
is indeed a Prince quite by himself today. 

"The magazine prophets of 1897 made a 
tragic failure. Not even by accident did they 
approach the truth. It has been said by men of 
mystic minds that 'the ideal is the only real.' 
Certain it is that the ideal which goose-walked 
in 1897 and murdered our fifty thousand boys 
a few years later, was poignantly real, and that 
all the so-called instructive, timely and tangible 
things discussed in the magazines were really 
nothing but phantoms. 

"An essay pubhshed in 1897 and entitled 
'Making of a Nation,' has a peculiar interest 
to me because of the marvelous things that 
happened to the author a few years later. He 
writes : There are few things more disconcert- 
ing to the thought, or in any effort to forecast 
the future of our affairs, than the fact that we 



176 DEKA PARSEC 

must continue to take our executive policy from 
presidents given us by nominating conventions 
and our legislation from conference committees 
of the House and Senate. Evidently it is a pure- 
ly Providential form of government.' These 
words were written by Woodrow Wilson, then 
a private citizen. Even he, destined as he was, 
to sit in the councils of the mighty, made no 
statement in the nature of prophecy. On the 
contrary he showed how difficult it is to forecast 
the future. 

"Surely, Deka," I said here, "you did not 
really expect to discover prophets by such a 
reading course." 

"No, not exactly," he returned, "but I did 
hope to discover evidences of wise men who 
could see and understand reality. It is perfect- 
ly plain now that the American and European 
ideals were the only realities then, but by a 
strange twist of fate, they were not mentioned 
by the illuminated minds of 1897. Did idealists 
of that day comprehend the deadly possibilities 
that lurked in a conflict between the American 
and the Prussian ideals? If they did, I have 
found no explanation of their discussions that 
touched nothing but the obvious and inconse- 
quential. 

"If Woodrow Wilson exhibited no gift of 



THE IDEAL THE ONLY REAL 177 

prophecy in relation to the specific and stupen- 
dous forces which it was his glory so soon to con- 
trol, it can be said for him in truth and justice 
that he always spoke for the reality of ideals. 
He sent young men out into the world from 
Princeton University with these words: *Our 
true wisdom is in our ideals. Practical judg- 
ments shift from age to age, but principles 
abide; and more stable than principles are the 
motives which simplify and ennoble life.' Years 
afterward he pleaded for the 'heart of the 
world' that it should not be broken, and men 
blinded by what they called practical judgments, 
laughed at his idealism. The ideal underlying 
that plea is the reality of today, whether un- 
shell-shocked people know it or not. It is the 
one masterful ideal whose acceptance or rejec- 
tion will determine the weal or woe of the com- 
ing twenty years. Any person who doubts the 
reality of such an ideal, merely because it is 
absent from the pages of this year's magazines, 
should study the public prints of A. D. 1897, 
note the ideals not mentioned therein, and then 
count the crosses in France." 



FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 



Again I found myself sitting with Deka Par- 
sec before the witching fireplace at Lizard 
Lodge. The frost of early autumn, creeping 
down from the snow-caps called for an extra 
log in the blaze. Night ruled out there above 
the trees and crags. All this added to my sense 
of well-being and coziness; shadows danced on 
the walls; the aromatic smoke called up half- 
forgotten experiences of childhood ; fiery castles 
built themselves in the flames and crumbled into 
storied ruins. I stretched out my feet to the 
grateful warmth and sighed in ursine content- 
ment. 

"That ribbon of white is the Rhine," I mur- 
mured reminiscently, "and there is Strasburg, 
and Mainz and Koblenz." 

"Traveling again, are you?" Deka inquired 
with a low, good-natured chuckle. "The ne- 
cromancy of the mountains has you in thrall, 
sure enough. You are in the exact state of 
mind to believe anything I tell you." 

"Don't I always believe you, Deka?" I asked 

179 



180 DEKA PARSEC 

in a tone that feigned a slight resentment at his 
inference. 

"Yes," he went on, "but I shall ask you now 
to beheve that only yesterday I visited five 
towns, all standing on the site of one. What do 
you make of that?" 

"Oh, that is not asking so much." I answer- 
ed. "Pedro, our Mexican friend, would merely 
shrug his shoulders and say: Who knows?' " 

"Well, then, be it known," Deka began, with 
mock solemnity that quickly shaded off into that 
color of thought which betokens honesty, "I 
visited a city by the sea and carried out an 
experiment which is very simple for any person 
whose nerves vibrate to the high-frequency of 
my shell-shocked voltage. For some time it has 
been my secret desire to do a little more travel- 
ing in strange lands, but Paloma and his fellows 
have become so sensitive to kindness that I can 
not think of giving them into the care of cruel 
drivers. So instead of going away I tried a 
travel experiment. I have long been conscious 
of the fact that no two persons ever see the 
same scene in the same way, and that I have 
only to see through the eyes and minds of others 
when I wish the refreshing changes of travel. 
For me this method of travehng or observing is 



FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 181 

only a kind of a mental step-down or step-up. 
Accordingly as soon as I had reached the city 
by the sea I decided to view it through the con- 
sciousness of the first person I should meet. 
This individual happened to be a substantial 
resident of the town on his way to work. In- 
stantly my own view faded out and I saw in 
sharp outlines, things that before had hidden 
away in the blur of my picture's background; 
washboards and soapsuds came out in bold re- 
lief ; clothes assembled on lines — for it was Mon- 
day morning — grocery trucks raced about, and 
people hurried to their places of business. Back- 
yards gave up their secrets in detail. I saw 
scraps of cabbage, turnip tops, watermelon- 
rinds, broken-down baby carriages, discarded 
automobile parts, forsaken dolls, left out over 
night, their garments wet with dew, odds and 
ends dragged in by playful pups, and milk sau- 
cers left near doors for cats. As I passed along 
the street I noticed every bit of paper and all 
the manifold forms of litter left by the Sunday 
crowd. I got the full force of the squeak in a 
passing automobile and also the heart-rending 
clatter of a flat wheel on an interurban car. 
Some cruel citizen was burning bones and hair, 
while another one filled the atmosphere with 
the pungent antidote of eucalyptus smoke. 



182 DEKA PARSEC 

"Surely I had never seen this town before ; I 
had never even suspected its existence. But 
there it was and growing in sordid expres- 
siveness. No doubt I would have followed my 
adopted mentality farther, to the very verge of 
some transplanted Ghetto, toward which his 
mind was leading, had I not just then met a 
man of very different type. Into his soul I 
leaped at once for the weal or the woe of it. My 
first look through his eyes presented an en- 
chanted view of the Palos Verdas hills. The 
fog draped them like ostrich plumes, while the 
sunlight, breaking through here and there, 
painted the crests in colors of infinite variety, 
crowning them with an ethereal beauty. Could 
the world in any of its parts present a more 
charming view? After enjoying the hills for a 
long time, I turned with my romantic mentor 
and looked in the opposite direction at the great 
column of black smoke rising from the power 
plant. How magnificent it was! I had never 
known that beauty could reside in smoke. A 
light sea breeze lifted the billows of black from 
the chimneys and painted the sky for miles to 
the eastward. It seemed that my borrowed 
mind would write an ode to smoke, but other 
wonders claimed its adoration. The ocean, gray 
under the wind, smiled in such a different way; 



FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 183 

I had never caught that smile before. I thought 
of its warmth, its good fish, its boundless sur- 
face, and its invitation to travel among far away 
uncharted isles. Back to land I came again 
with my adopted soul. I turned and viewed the 
amphitheatre of hills, the impressive high 
school building on Camino Real, that road of 
many an ancient tale. Verily my borrowed eyes 
deceived me! This street is not the Rue des 
Italiens, neither is it Pennsylvania Avenue, but 
whence the glamor of it; whence this strange 
man's way of seeing it ? Eagerly I followed him 
down to Pacific Avenue. I saw great structures 
that glowed with human consciousness as they 
ushered travelers into the city, through it and 
out again with a hearty wish for their early 
return. I almost lost myself in the streets of 
reality following the footsteps of one who saw 
another city. Peering through the trees at an 
old deserted estate, I saw something white, like 
a marble temple shining in the green ; it was a 
library, stately in its lines, ample in dimensions, 
sedate, retiring and yet inviting. The owner of 
my borrowed eyes turned and went down to the 
beach. I followed him northward along the 
Strand, now a veritable Victoria Embankment, 
some one's dream come true. And I caught out- 
lines of ships riding in a safe harbor, yachts, 



184 DEKA PARSEC 

coastwise visitors and deep sea voyagers adven- 
turing from the lands of the spices. I breathed 
the odors of the Orient and felt the moving in- 
spiration of a city that looks out upon the world. 
Turning with my mentor to view the encircling 
hills again, I saw a city more splendid than 
Naples. For a long time I stood in rapture, for- 
getful, while in some way he of the vision de- 
parted. Another little journey had ended, and 
I was sorry. 

"No seasoned traveler tarries long to regret 
the loss of scenes however pleasing, for he must 
push onward into other places that are also 
strange and new. Moreover, I remembered that 
my last adopted eyes belonged to middle age, 
and they must have been the eyes of a poor, idle 
dreamer out of harmony with facts and prac- 
tical ways of life. Now I wished to see the city 
through the soul of youth — overflowing, exub- 
erant youth — and so when a young man drove 
up to the curb in a fine expensive roadster, I 
ruthlessly applied my psychic arts and dissolved 
the erstwhile temple, vistas, beclouded hills, 
oriental spices and phantom ships, and then I 
looked about me in wonder at the metamor- 
phosis. What a slow, dull town this Monday 
morning! How utterly lacking in cheering dis- 
play ! No jazz ; no girls ; no secret paths leading 



FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 185 

to forbidden beverages; no crowd; nothing to 
stir the soul ! My youthful eyes survey the de- 
serted EI Paseo. How tiresome the encirding 
hills when I permit my gaze to wander across 
the car tracks for a moment ! Perhaps there is 
a hinterland in this town with its high schools 
and highbrows, but I am young, full of red 
blood and on the quest of joy. What a dull 
town! How impossible! There is absolutely 
nothing to do. And so the tragic pessimism of 
youth descended upon me and carried me along 
with a rush and back to the very step of the 
roadster where at last I broke the psychic spell 
and gave up my borrowed eyes again. The 
youth whose overflowing joy I fain would have 
known, sped out of town, scourged on by a re- 
morseless disappointment, and doubtless he 
shall ever speed until he finds a city that is 
beautiful and gay and full of excitement. 

"It was still morning and I had seen three 
towns scattered over the world. Time remained 
for more. A Httle child played on the street. 
I wondered how the town seemed to him. In 
shell-shock to wish is to know, and so behold 
me rolling in the dust, the undisputed owner of 
glittering gold and precious stones. A rivulet 
from a leaky hydrant is the noble Mississippi 
winding its way through a vast countryside. 



186 DEKA PARSEC 

The town is now the whole world, and the end 
of it is the place where houses meet across the 
street, far away. The trees extend to the very 
heavens and play with the sun. Larger people 
and horses are creatures that have been on the 
streets throughout all the eternal past and they 
will be here forever. All the buildings have a 
ravishing beauty; their windows smile; their 
doors speak kind words to little people who play 
in the dirt. How beautiful the varicolored paper 
that litters the walks; how fascinating the 
empty lunch boxes with their pretty pictures! 
What interesting things are the bright, red 
cigar bands, scattered about, and even the half- 
burned cigars themselves with their strange 
strong odor that makes you cough ! What high, 
impressive, dizzy poles, with their wires that 
only God can reach ! What a beautiful town full 
of fairies and wonders ! 

"Looking up then at a passing patriarch, I 
made one more psychic transformation. The 
glittering gold vanished from the dust; the 
buildings only a short distance away melted into 
each other. People came out of a visual fog, 
although the sun was shining, and went back 
into the fog again. I saw their minds more 
than their bodies. As 1 passed along in this 
queer, circumscribed town with its short, misty 



FIVE TOWNS IN ONE 187 

perspectives, I was conscious of a love that 
seemed quite illogical ; it included all things liv- 
ing and not living. Details were all gone; no 
sharp outlines remained anywhere. The houses, 
the trees, the flowers and the people were suf- 
fused with an unearthly radiance that only the 
patriarch and I could detect. 

"The earth, and every common sight did seem 
Apparelled in celestial light." 

"At the brow of the hill we parted and my 
five little journeys for the day were ended." 

"And which of these five towns do you think 
was the real one, Deka?" I asked. 

"The real one?" he repeated, "Why, they 
were all real." 



THE POETIC ATTITUDE 



We were in the bottom of a canon, Deka Par- 
sec and I, while the spirit of the place and 
Deka's moods guided our conversation. 

"Suppose we sit down on this boulder," I sug- 
gested, "unless you are in a hurry." 

"My hurry was hke a sore tooth, so I had it 
extracted," he replied. "Do you know," he con- 
tinued, when we had made ourselves comfor- 
table on the rock, "I have been thinking about 
our first meeting, and I can not escape the con- 
viction that the attitude of the beholder really 
makes his world. Now for example, here I am 
in the very same world with other people, but 
it is a different world to me, thanks to high ex- 
plosive. It is so different from the world that 
every other man seems to see. I know all the 
time, of course, that it is I and not the world 
that has changed." 

"Yes," I agreed, "each person must live with- 
in the bounds of his own reality, but you under- 
stand more than ordinary mortals for you have 
lived in two worlds." 

189 



190 DEKA PARSEC 

"No, it is not quite like having lived in two 
worlds," he explained; "it is more that the 
former world of my mind is now the memory of 
a dream. My present attitude is the real one. 
The terrific force of an exploding shell blasted 
away the universe of my attitude as it existed 
then and brought into being another interpre- 
tation, and I think, a better one. Yet it makes 
me wonder, for, if my present state is a better 
one, may there not still be an unattained best? 
The fact that a change in my brain had the 
power to transform a world proves for me that 
the one actual and absolute world exists only in 
the conception of God. It shows that my blast- 
ed and distorted view of life can, after all, be 
as near the actual fact as the view of any other 
person. Take for example, the poetic attitude. 
There was a time in my life when poetry seemed 
abnormal and unreal. Now, when I reahze that 
the universe can only be an attitude at best for 
any mind less than the mind of God, I feel that 
the poet's picture is the best of all, for he has 
the picture of beauty, and it is always beauty 
that gives the pleasure. You see, my motive is 
entirely selfish." 

"May not every moral code be selfish in the 
last analysis?" I asked wishing to justify him 



THE POETIC ATTITUDE 191 

and encourage further confidence on the subject 
of shell shock. 

"Altogether selfish, of course," he answered 
quickly, and I could see that he was pleased. 
"Morality is a human code. It is good for a 
human being to be moral and bad for him to be 
immoral. Bad people are foolish; they suffer 
consequences, not punishment. There are many 
ways of being bad. Beauty has a moral code. 
We may be immoral in our attitude to beauty. 
Being immoral I mean that we break the rules 
of beauty or ignore their existence. The penalty 
is that we are deprived of the high pleasure 
that beauty gives. When I was in the univer- 
sity we studied strength of material ; we learned 
how lumber should be sawed ; how to construct 
beams and girders. I studied the possibilities 
of trees from standing timber in the forest to 
the finished truss of a bridge. Had some one 
brought me here in that period of my life, and 
placed me on this boulder, I might have looked 
at that gnarled sycamore and remarked that it 
was quite useless, but, today, under the spell of 
nerves that other men call jangled, I see the 
tree as the poet sees it. 

"Think of a civil engineer looking at a tree 
in that way! In my normal days I considered 
the poets mad. Now it seems to me that all 



192 DEKA PARSEC 

persons who do not love poetry are immoral to 
the claims of beauty. They might sit right here 
in this dell and receive no message from that 
azure wonder we call the sky, but for us it sings. 

"The mountain peaks that shine afar, 
The silent stars, the pathless sea. 
Are living signs of all we are, 
And types of all we hope to be." 

"In the days before my nerves were tightened 
to blend with some unattainable overtone, I 
thought of grass as something common, some- 
thing to walk upon and to make up into useful 
hay; but now it creeps into my heart; it is a 
living entity, and for it, as for all her children. 
Nature has found a voice to say : 

*Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere, 

By the dusty roadside. 

On the sunny hillside. 

Close by the noisy brook. 

In every shady nook, 
I come creeping, creeping everywhere.' 

"That is the voice of the grass for me. Think 
of that everwhelming army, the army of the 
grass; nothing can stay it, nothing can stem 
the awful tide of its creeping, creeping every- 
where. Over the battlefields of France, under 



THE POETIC ATTITUDE 193 

wire entanglements, among the countless 
crosses where sleep the heroic dead, the con- 
quering army of the grass comes with its im- 
perious, 'creeping everywhere.' " 

"Hearts may break and the traffic of the 
world may roar, but the great and all-conquer- 
ing soul of Nature is creeping, silently creeping 
everywhere. Why hurry, we mortals, and get 
excited, when the grass wins every battle ?" 

The mountain wind freshened a little until an 
eddying gust flung a shower of blossoms from a 
bush. They seemed not to fall upon the ground, 
but upon the soul of my friend. The high stress 
of his emotion was imparted to me. I could feel 
his spirit standing at attention, giving the 
salute ; we were present at a sacred rite. 

"You felt the flowers fall, didn't you," he 
murmured. "Our spirits peeped at each other 
through the veils, just for one fleeting moment: 

'We are spirits clad in veils; 

Man by man was never seen; 
All our deep communing fails 

To remove the shadowy screen. 

Heart to heart was never known; 

Mind with mind did never meet; 
We are columns left alone 

Of a temple once complete. 



194 DEKA PARSEC 

What is social company 

But a babbling summer stream? 
What our wise philosophy 

But the glancing of a dream?' 

"But, Deka," I suggested, "doesn't poetry im- 
pose upon us to some extent, and even take 
away our common sense, at times? Is it not 
like music in this respect? Haunting melodies 
and poems with a strange lilt have often in- 
veigled me into acts and thoughts not in con- 
sonance with my tried and trusted moods." 

"Oh, yes," he admitted, "poetry and music do 
impose upon the unshell-shocked mind which 
does not wish to change its practical orienta- 
tion. Poetry rushes the citadel of the soul and 
often overthrows the rational defender. With 
me, however, there is no conflict, because I live 
in that no-man's land, that borderland where 
mood and reason interchange their roles. I can 
safely give way to poetic sentiments, for by so 
doing I am merely maintaining the average 
level of my own mentality. Only the other 
evening when I was alone at Lizard LfOdge, and 
the wind moaned in the chimney in a ghostly 
way, it pleased me to listen and to make believe 
that it was a "midnight dreary." Ah, the lux- 
ury of the lugubrious! Chills crept along my 
spine, and: 



THE POETIC ATTITUDE 195 

Then, methought the air grew denser, perfumed from 

an unseen censer 
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the 

tufted floor. 
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee— by these 

angels he hath sent thee, 

Respite — ^respite and nepenthe from thy memories of 
Lenore ! 

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost 
Lenore !" 

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."* 



"For a long time the wind in the chimney 
kept up the refrain and moaned "Nevermore." 
Perhaps you will say there can be no reality in 
such a state of mind, but here I can not agree 
with you. The world of poesy is in every way 
as real as any other world. Indeed, I beheve 
that in some part of the infinite universe every- 
thing that we can possibly imagine actually 
exists in an objective sense, because the finite 
mind can not imagine beyond the infinite. The 
limited can never overcome the unlimited. The 
poet may reason cogently or he may only dream, 
but if we follow him in the spirit of his song 
we will find the real. We, sitting here in the 
presence of the sycamores, may reconstruct our 
world according to the poetic attitude of the 



196 DEKA PARSEC 

moment — our very heart's desire — and thereby 
find and cherish reality in a song which, only 
for poets, truly sings : 



"The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the mom; 
Morning's at seven; 
The hill's dew-pearled; 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn; 
God's in His heaven — 
All's right with the world." 



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